ENGLISH CLASSICS FOR SCHOOLS 

THE SECOND ESSAY 

ON 

THE EARL OF CHATHAM 

(WILLIAM PITT) 



LORD MACAULAY 



483 

5 ni8 
*y l 



NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

1892 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf JJS&483 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



ENGLISH CLASSICS FOR SCHOOLS 

THE SECOND ESSAY 

ON 

THE EARL OF CHATHAM 

(WILLIAM PITT) 



LORD MACAULAY 



/ 

NEW YORK • : • CINCINNATI • I ■ CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
1892 



-h 



."Pt 



Copyrighted, 1892, by 
American Book Company. 



sjrtntel" by 

ammiam fivison 

IRcw UJork, HI. S. H. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in Leicestershire, 
Oct. 25, 1800. "Of all good gifts which it is in the power of 
fortune to bestow," says one of his biographers, " none can sur- 
pass the being born of wise, honorable, and tender parents." 
This was Macaulay's happy lot. His father was Zachary 
Macaulay, remembered for his zealous opposition to the slave 
trade. His mother was Selina Mills, a lady of Quaker descent. 
Fortune had not withheld other gifts. Macaulay's father was a 
wealthy merchant, and thus all the conditions were favorable to 
the development of the abilities and character that the son had 
inherited. 

Before he was ten years old, as one of his sisters tells us, 
Macaulay showed a decided bent for literature, and a good deal 
of juvenile prose and verse attests his precocity. He entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818. He was averse to mathe- 
matical and scientific studies, but achieved much distinction at 
the university by his poems and essays, and by his speeches in 
the debating society. He received his degree in 1822, and four 
years later was admitted to the bar. 

Macaulay's essay on " Milton," then just published, attracted 
attention throughout the world of letters ; and several public ad- 
dresses, admirable in form and substance, seemed to prefigure for 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

him a parliamentary career. When, about this time, commercial 
disaster befell his father, it was plain that Macaulay, upon whom 
the family support devolved, could not count for maintenance 
upon his chosen profession of the law. At the instance of power- 
ful friends, he was in 1828 made a commissioner of bankruptcy, 
and two years afterward he entered the House of Commons as 
member for Calne, a pocket-borough in the gift of Lord Lans- 
downe. 

Macaulay was an ardent Whig, being, as he would have ex- 
pressed it, " a strong party man on the right side," and his first 
parliamentary speech was in favor of the bill for the removal of 
Jewish disabilities. He supported with great eloquence the re- 
form acts of 1 83 1 and 1832. The next year he was returned a 
member for Leeds. He warmly advocated the measures for the 
reform of the Indian Government and the abolition of slavery. 

In 1834 he was appointed to a seat in the Supreme Council of 
India. This place he held till 1838, and the munificent salary 
attached to it (^10,000) gave him the independence needful for 
the carrying-out of his great literary work, the " History of Eng- 
land." His "Essays," by which he is best known to the general 
reader, were many of them of the nature of preliminary historical 
studies. Before his political preferment, these pieces had served 
to increase Macaulay's slender income : those written after his 
return from India were the outcome of choice and greater leisure. 

Macaulay reentered Parliament in 1839, — this time as mem- 
ber for Edinburgh, — and became secretary of war in Melbourne's 
ministry. In 1846 he was paymaster-general, as Chatham had 
been before him. 

The first two volumes of his " History " appeared in 1848, and 
were followed by two more in 1855. Two years later he was 



IN TROD UCTION. 5 

raised to the peerage. He died of heart disease in December, 
1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets' Corner, 
near the statue of Addison. 

Macaulay lacked some of the traits we are accustomed to look 
for in lofty natures. We are told that he was ignorant of the 
deeper emotions ; that his sensibilities were not delicate ; that he 
lacked piety of mind, had no sympathy with high speculation, 
and displayed but little interest even in the practical problems of 
science and social life. On the other hand, his virtues were 
many and great. He was an affectionate friend, and blameless, 
unselfish, and magnanimous in every relation of life. His nature 
was simple, manly, and straightforward. He hated lies, liars, 
and all evil ; and one of the reasons he is never dull is that he 
was deeply in earnest in all he wrote. 

Macaulay's powers of memory were very great, and the extent 
of his reading has perhaps never been exceeded. Like Johnson, 
Coleridge, and other men of great information, he was an exuber- 
ant talker ; and like most men who talk well, he was, it may be, 
but a poor listener. In one of Mrs. Carlyle's letters, she pays 
the historian the doubtful compliment of saying, " I used to think 
my husband the most copious talker, when he liked, that was 
anywhere to be fallen in with ; but Macaulay beats him hollow 
— in quantity." Of Coleridge, we are told by De Quincey that 
his friend used to stipulate for no interruptions to his table-talk 
as the first condition of his dining out. Coleridge was a talker, 
not a conversationalist. Macaulay talked as much as Coleridge 
ever did ; but London society listened gladly to his discourse, 
brightened at every turn by " images from the poets, shrewd 
thrusts from the satirists, wise saws from sages, and pleasantries 
from the humorists." It is a pity we have no record of these 



b IN TK ODUC TION. 

talks, for it is said that Macaulay talked very much as he wrote, 

and no one thinks that he wrote too much. 

His fame rests on his " Lays of Ancient Rome," his " History," 
and his " Essays." It is with the last that we are here concerned. 
Though the titles of the " Essays " suggest biography, most of 
them are in fact detached chapters of history. The Second Essay 
on Chatham — the text of the following pages — discloses in 
every paragraph Macaulay's marvelous mastery of historic detail. 
Here and there are stately and melodious passages ; yet the very 
minuteness of the account, with its array of dates, names, and 
titles, sensibly jolts and impedes the progress of the piece. 

Examples of Macaulay's more fluent manner are afforded by 
his essay on " Sir William Temple " and by his " Milton." It is 
customary to speak of his early style as florid ; and Macaulay 
himself declared in later life that his " Milton " was " overloaded 
with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." But just as the first form 
in which one would cast a thought is often the best, so it will 
frequently happen that the earliest work of a great artist has 
characteristic excellences that the refinement of maturity cannot 
replace. It was not without reason that the essay on " Milton " 
drew all eyes upon the writer of it. 

Macaulay's style is the most original thing about him. By it 
he was able to give to written language a good share of the glow 
and rush of spoken oratory. Critics have pointed to his wealth 
of epithet, the rhythm of his periods, and the masterly unity of 
each of his pieces. Yet beyond the reach of analysis there re- 
mains a something that is Macaulay's that cannot be defined. 
" You will ask science in vain to tell you," says Saintsbury, 
" why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language 
arranged by one man in one fashion make a permanent addition 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

to the delight of the world, while other words differently arranged 
by another do not." 

The most eminent of later English historians, Freeman, says of 
Macaulay's writing : " He is a model of style, ■ — of style not merely 
as a kind of luxury, but of style in its practical aspect. ... I 
learned from him that if I wished to be understood by others, or 
indeed by myself, I must avoid, not always long sentences, — for 
long sentences may often be perfectly clear, — but involved, com- 
plicated, parenthetical sentences. I learned that I must avoid 
sentences crowded with relatives and participles, — sentences in 
which things are not so much directly stated as implied in some 
dark and puzzling fashion. I learned, also, never to be afraid 
of using the same word or name over and over again, if by that 
means anything could be added to clearness or force. Macaulay 
never goes on, like some writers, talking about ' the former ' and 
'the latter,' 'he, she, it, they,' through clause after clause, while 
his reader has to look back to see which of several persons it 
is that is so darkly referred to. No doubt a pronoun, like any 
other word, may often be repeated with advantage, if it is per- 
fectly clear who is meant by the noun; and with Macaulay's 
pronouns it is always perfectly clear who is meant by them. . . . 
The care which Macaulay took to write, before all things, good 
and clear English, may be followed by writers who make no at- 
tempt to imitate his style, and who may be led by nature to some 
quite different style of their own. In every language and in 
every kind of writing, purity of speech, and clearness of expres- 
sion, must be the first virtues of all." 

William Pitt was born at Westminster in 1708. He died at 
the age of seventy, having been for twenty years the greatest 



8 IN TR OD UC TIOiV. 

figure in English public life. To distinguish him from his illus- 
trious son and namesake, he is commonly referred to by his title. 
When, in 1766, he became first Earl of Chatham, he divested 
himself, as Macaulay points out in a following page, of that far 
higher title of " the Great Commoner," which an admiring nation 
had conferred upon him. 

The life of this great man is of interest to lovers of liberty 
and law everywhere. To us Americans, who live under the 
Constitution of 1787, whatever relates to the career of the Eng- 
lish statesman who " rejoiced that America had resisted " must 
have an interest deeper still. The accompanying Second Essay 
of Macaulay outlines the political life of Chatham after the year 
1760. Only the salient features of his earlier career can here be 
indicated. 

Pitt was educated at Oxford, where he was distinguished rather 
for his extensive reading and information than for any special 
attainments. His university studies were cut short by a severe 
attack of gout. This disease had tortured him even in boyhood ; 
he was never wholly free from it ; and it was the cause of his 
death in 1778. 

In 1735 young Pitt entered Parliament for the famous rotten> 
borough of Old Sarum. He inherited this seat, as he may have 
inherited the gout, from his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, who was 
at one time governor of Madras, and who, out of the wealth this 
post brought him, had purchased the tenure of the borough. 

In Parliament Pitt allied himself at once with the Whig oppo- 
sition. Among his most effective speeches were several against 
the Hanoverian subsidies, — the substance of which he afterward 
recanted, — and those in which, in 1742, he urged the investiga- 
tion of Walpole's administration. Only the general tenor of these 



IN TROD UC TION. 9 

speeches is known. The familiar and famous oration in which 
he pleaded guilty to " the atrocious crime of being a young man," 
— a supposed sneer of Walpole's, — was never delivered by Pitt. 
It was, like other celebrated speeches, written by Samuel Johnson 
in his " Parliamentary Reports " for the " Gentleman's Magazine." 

In 1 746 Pitt was appointed paymaster-general of the forces, 
under the administration of the Pelhams. The rich perquisites 
of this place consisted of interest on public moneys while in hand, 
and of a commission on all foreign subsidies. These perquisites 
had been pocketed without question by all previous paymasters- 
general. Pitt, though poor, — he was a younger son, — refused 
to draw a shilling from his office beyond the salary legally attach- 
ing to it. This refusal was well calculated to call forth, in that 
age of venal statesmen, the popular confidence which at once 
followed upon it. 

In 1754 Pitt married Lady Hester Grenville, the sister of 
George Grenville and of the first Earl Temple. Macaulay fre- 
quently refers to the political bearings of this alliance. In 1757 
the famous coalition ministry of Pitt and Newcastle was formed, 
with Pitt as secretary of state for foreign affairs. This cabinet 
held together for four years ; and it was during Pitt's adminis- 
tration that England achieved her greatest successes in India, 
Europe, and America. The following essay takes up at this point 
the subject of his later career. 

Pitt was a man of penetrating intelligence, resolute courage, 
promptitude, self-command, and firmness of purpose. In his 
administration of foreign affairs he was an enthusiastic patriot, 
having the sole purpose of promoting the welfare and influence 
of England. To this end all the energies of his nature were con- 
stantly directed. Nothing restrained his arrogance in dealing 



I o IN TR OD UC TION. 

with foreign nations, and in many ways he was deserving of the 
epithet of " dictator " applied to him by Dr. Johnson. 

It has been said that the theme afforded by Chatham's public 
life was especially congenial to Macaulay. The historian's own 
nature was firm and courageous ; and courage and firmness were 
virtues that, when exhibited in the lives of other men, as in Chat- 
ham and Clive, kindled in him a special fervor. Yet Macaulay 
could call Chatham " vain and resentful," " an actor in the closet, 
at council, and in Parliament." And it is probable that the esti- 
mate of Pitt that is to be found in the two essays is the finest 
example of balanced judgments that Macaulay has left us. 

He began the first of these sketches by saying, "All who em- 
ploy themselves in illustrating the lives of others are peculiarly 
exposed to the disease of admiration." These words of judicious 
caution have not sufficed to deter later historians from indiscrim- 
inating eulogy of Lord Chatham. His real achievements were 
very great, and by these his title to greatness was long ago fixed. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 



MORE than ten years ago we commenced a sketch of the 
political life of the great Lord Chatham. 2 We then stopped 
at the death of George II., with the intention of speedily resum- 
ing our task. Circumstances, which it would be tedious to ex- 
plain, long prevented us from carrying this intention into effect. 
Nor can we regret the delay, for the materials which were within 
our reach in 1834 were scanty and unsatisfactory when compared 
with those which we at present possess. 3 Even now, though we 
have had access to some valuable sources of information which 
have not yet been opened to the public, we cannot but feel that 
the history of the first ten years of the reign of George III. is but 
imperfectly known to us ; nevertheless we are inclined to think 
that we are in a condition to lay before our readers a narrative 
neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. We therefore return with 
pleasure to our long-interrupted labor. 

We left Pitt in the zenith of prosperity and glory, the idol of 
England, the terror of France, the admiration of the whole civil- 
ized world. 4 The wind, from whatever quarter it blew, carried to 

1 From the Edinburgh Review, October, 1844. This is the last essay 
that Macaulay wrote for that periodical. 

2 Edinburgh Review, January, 1834. 

3 This essay was in theory a " review" of Pitt's Correspondence, and of 
the Letters of Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, then recently republished. 

4 With Pitt as secretary of state for foreign affairs, the French power in 
Canada and in India had been broken; and when George II. died, in 1760, 
England was the first maritime and colonial power in the world. 



12 MACAULAY. 

England tidings of battles won, fortresses taken, provinces added 
to the empire. At home factions had sunk into a lethargy, such 
as had never been known since the great religious schism of the 
sixteenth century l had roused the public mind from repose. 

In order that the events which we have to relate may be 
clearly understood, it may be desirable that we should advert to 
the causes which had for a time suspended the animation of both 
the great English parties. 

If, rejecting all that is merely accidental, we look at the essen- 
tial characteristics of the Whig and the Tory, we may consider 
each of them as the representative of a great principle, essential 
to the welfare of nations. One is in an especial manner the 
guardian of liberty ; and the other, of order. One is the moving 
power, and the other the steadying power of the state. One is 
the sail, without which society would make no progress ; the 
other, the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a 
tempest. But, during the forty-six years which followed the ac- 
cession of the House of Hanover, 2 these distinctive peculiarities 
seemed to be effaced. The Whig conceived that he could not 
better serve the cause of civil and religious freedom than by 
strenuously supporting the Protestant dynasty : the Tory con- 
ceived that he could not better prove his hatred of revolutions 
than by attacking a government to which a revolution had given 
birth. 3 Both came by degrees to attach more importance to the 
means than to the end ; both were thrown into unnatural situa- 
tions ; and both, like animals transported to an uncongenial cli- 
mate, languished and degenerated. The Tory, removed from the 

i The abolition of the papal power in England, and the establishment of 
the Anglican Church. 

2 By the Act of Settlement of 1701, the succession to the English crown 
was secured, next after Anne, to Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, and her 
Protestant descendants. Accordingly, upon the death of Queen Anne in 
1 7 14, George Lewis of Brunswick, the Elector of Hanover, became George I. 
of England. The reigning family are his descendants. 

3 The revolution of 1688, when Parliament adopted the famous Bill of 
Rights, curtailing the powers of the Crown. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 13 

sunshine of the court, was as a camel in the snows of Lapland : 
the Whig, basking in the rays of royal favor, was as a reindeer in 
the sands of Arabia. 

Dante tells us 1 that he saw, in Malebolge, a strange encounter 
between a human form and a serpent. The enemies, after cruel 
wounds inflicted, stood for a time glaring on each other. A great 
cloud surrounded them, and then a wonderful metamorphosis 
began. Each creature was transfigured into the likeness of its 
antagonist. The serpent's tail divided itself into two legs : the 
man's legs intertwined themselves into a tail. The body of the 
serpent put forth arms : the arms of the man shrank into his 
body. At length the serpent stood up a man, and spake : the 
man sank down a serpent, and glided, hissing, away. Some- 
thing like this was the transformation which, during the reign of 
George I., 2 befell the two English parties. Each gradually took 
the shape and color of its foe, till at length the Tory rose up 
erect the zealot of freedom, and the Whig crawled and licked the 
dust at the feet of power. 

It is true, that when these degenerate politicians discussed 
questions merely speculative, and, above all, when they discussed 
questions relating to the conduct of their own grandfathers, they 
still seemed to differ as their grandfathers had differed. The 
Whig, who during three Parliaments had never given one vote 
against the court, and who was ready to sell his soul for the comp- 
troller's staff or for the Great Wardrobe, still professed to draw 
his political doctrines from Locke and Milton ; still worshiped 
the memory of Pym and Hampden ; and would still, on the 30th 
of January, take his glass, first to the man in the mask, and then 
to the man who would do it without a mask. 3 The Tory, on the 

1 Inferno, canto xxv., lines 41-131. 

2 George I. reigned from 1714 to 1727; George II., from 1727 to 1760. 

3 Pym and Hampden in Parliament, and Milton with the pen, were the 
most influential upholders of the Commonwealth (1649-59). Akin to their 
free and inquisitive minds was the spirit of Locke, but his politics and politi- 
cal writings belonged to a somewhat later period. Charles I. was beheaded 
Jan. 30, 1649, the headsman being masked, as was then the custom. 



14 MACAU LAY. 

other hand, while he reviled die mild and temperate Walpole as 
a deadly enemy of liberty, could see nothing to reprobate in the 
iron tyranny of Strafford and Laud. 1 But, whatever judgment 
the Whig or the Tory of that age might pronounce on transactions 
long past, there can be no doubt, that, as respected the practical 
questions then pending, the Tory was a reformer, and indeed an 
intemperate and indiscreet reformer, while the Whig was con- 
servative even to bigotry. 2 We have ourselves seen similar effects 
produced in a neighboring country by similar causes. Who 
would have believed, fifteen years ago, 3 that M. Guizot and M. 
Villemain would have to defend property and social order against 
the attacks of such enemies as M. Genoude and M. de La Roche 
Jaquelin? 

Thus the successors of the old Cavaliers had turned dema- 
gogues: the successors of the old Roundheads had turned 
courtiers. Yet was it long before their mutual animosity began 
to abate, for it is the nature of parties to retain their original 
enmities far more firmly than their original principles. During 
many years, a generation of Whigs, whom Sidney would have 
spurned as slaves, continued to wage deadly war with a generation 
of Tories whom Jeffreys would have hanged for republicans. 4 

Through the whole reign of George I., and through nearly half 
of the reign of George II., a Tory was regarded as an enemy of 
the reigning house, and was excluded from all the favors of the 
Crown. Though most of the country gentlemen were Tories, 

1 Strafford and Laud were aggressive supporters of royal prerogative as 
against the Parliament, and both suffered death for treason to the Common- 
wealth. Sir Robert Walpole was (Whig) prime-minister from 1 721 to 1742. 

2 This passage used to be cited to correct the once common prejudice 
against Macaulay, that he was to the last a narrow and bitter Whig. 

3 That is, before the revolution of 1830. 

4 Algernon Sidney had applauded the execution of Charles I. Jeffreys, 
the " infamous judge," was a creature of Charles II. This powerful illus- 
tration of Macaulay's derives much of its force from the fact that it was Jef- 
freys who in 1683 pronounced upon Sidney sentence of death, the outcome 
of a mock-trial for treasonable conspiracy against the King. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 15 

none but Whigs were created peers and baronets." Though most 
of the clergy were Tories, none but Whigs were appointed deans 
and bishops. In every county, opulent and well-descended Tory 
squires complained that their names were left out of the commis- 
sion of the peace, 1 while men of small estate and mean birth, who 
were for toleration and excise, septennial parliaments and stand- 
ing armies, presided at quarter sessions, and became deputy-lieu- 
tenants. 

By degrees some approaches were made towards a reconcilia- 
tion. While Walpole was at the head of affairs, enmity to his 
power induced a large and powerful body of Whigs, headed by 
the heir-apparent 2 of the throne, to make an alliance with the 
Tories, and a truce even with the Jacobites. 3 After Sir Robert's 
fall, 4 the ban which lay on the Tory party was taken off. The 
chief places in the administration continued to be filled by Whigs, 
and, indeed, could scarcely have been filled otherwise ; for the 
Tory nobility and gentry, though strong in numbers and in prop- 
erty, had among them scarcely a single man distinguished by tal- 
ents, either for business or for debate. A few of them, however, 
were admitted to subordinate offices ; and this indulgence pro- 
duced a softening effect on the temper of the whole body. The 
first levee of George II. after Walpole's resignation was a re- 
markable spectacle. Mingled with the constant supporters of 
the House of Brunswick, 5 with the Russells, the Cavendishes, 
and the Pelhams, appeared a crowd of faces utterly unknown to 
the pages and gentleman ushers, lords of rural manors, whose ale 
and foxhounds were renowned in the neighborhood of the Men- 
dip hills, or round the Wrekin, 6 but who had never crossed the 

1 A commission under the great seal constituting one or more persons 
justices of the peace. 

2 Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. 

3 From the Latin Jacobus ("James"); the adherents of James II. after 
his abdication, or of his descendants. 

4 In 1742. 5 gee Note 3, p. 12. 

6 Hills in Somersetshire and Shropshire, both of which counties are re- 
mote from the capital. 



1 6 MACAU LAY. 

threshold of the palace since the days when Oxford, with the 
white staff in his hand, stood behind Queen Anne. 1 

During the eighteen years which followed this day, both fac- 
tions were gradually sinking deeper and deeper into repose. The 
apathy of the public mind is partly to be ascribed to the unjust 
violence with which the administration of Walpole had been 
assailed. In the body politic, as in the natural body, morbid 
languor generally succeeds morbid excitement. The people had 
been maddened by sophistry, by calumny, by rhetoric, by stimu- 
lants applied to the national pride. In the fullness of bread, they 
had raved as if famine had been in the land. While enjoying 
such a measure of civil and religious freedom as, till then, no 
great society had ever known, they had cried out for a Timoleon 
or a Brutus 2 to stab their oppressor to the heart. They were in 
this frame of mind when the change of administration took place ; 
and they soon found that there was to be no change whatever in 
the system of government. The natural consequences followed. 
To frantic zeal succeeded sullen indifference. The cant of pa- 
triotism had not merely ceased to charm the public ear, but had 
become as nauseous as the cant of Puritanism after the downfall 
of the Rump. 3 The hot fit was over ; the cold fit had begun : 
and it was long before seditious arts, or even real grievances, 
could bring back the fiery paroxysm which had run its course and 
reached its termination. 

Two attempts were made to disturb this tranquillity : the ban- 
ished heir of the House of Stuart 4 headed a rebellion ; the dis- 
contented heir of the House of Brunswick headed an opposition. 
Both the rebellion and the opposition came to nothing. The 

1 That is, since the accession of the House of Hanover. The white staff 
is the lord high treasurer's badge of office. 

2 Zealots in the cause of liberty who conspired against and assisted in the 
assassination of their civil rulers, — Timoleon of his elder brother Timophanes, 
and Brutus of his friend CEesar. 

5 That is, the so-called Rump Parliament of the Commonwealth. 
4 Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II. 



ENGLISH CLASSICS FOR SCHOOLS 

THE SECOND ESSAY 

ON 

THE EARL OF CHATHAM 

(WILLIAM PITT) 



BY 

LORD MACAULAY 



NEW YORK • : ■ CINCINNATI • : • CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
1892 



Copyrighted, 1892, by 
American Book Company. 



$>nnre& b£ 

axatlUam (fvison 

■ftew JJovr, m. S. n. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in Leicestershire, 
Oct. 25, 1800. "Of all good gifts which it is in the power of 
fortune to bestow," says one of his biographers, " none can sur- 
pass the being born of wise, honorable, and tender parents." 
This was Macaulay's happy lot. His father was Zachary 
Macaulay, remembered for his zealous opposition to the slave 
trade. His mother was Selina Mills, a lady of Quaker descent. 
Fortune had not withheld other gifts. Macaulay's father was a 
wealthy merchant, and thus all the conditions were favorable to 
the development of the abilities and character that the son had 
inherited. 

Before he was ten years old, as one of his sisters tells us, 
Macaulay showed a decided bent for literature, and a good deal 
of juvenile prose and verse attests his precocity. He entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge, in 18 18. He was averse to mathe- 
matical and scientific studies, but achieved much distinction at 
the university by his poems and essays, and by his speeches in 
the debating society. He received his degree in 1822, and four 
years later was admitted to the bar. 

Macaulay's essay on " Milton," then just published, attracted 
attention throughout the world of letters ; and several public ad- 
dresses, admirable in form and substance, seemed to prefigure for 



4 INTRODUCTION. 

him a parliamentary career. When, about this time, commercial 
disaster befell his father, it was plain that Macaulay, upon whom 
the family support devolved, could not count for maintenance 
upon his chosen profession of the law. At the instance of power- 
ful friends, he was in 1828 made a commissioner of bankruptcy, 
and two years afterward he entered the House of Commons as 
member for Calne, a pocket-borough in the gift of Lord Lans- 
downe. 

Macaulay was an ardent Whig, being, as he would have ex- 
pressed it, " a strong party man on the right side," and his first 
parliamentary speech was in favor of the bill for the removal of 
Jewish disabilities. He supported with great eloquence the re- 
form acts of 1 83 1 and 1832. The next year he was returned a 
member for Leeds. He warmly advocated the measures for the 
reform of the Indian Government and the abolition of slavery. 

In 1834 he was appointed to a seat in the Supreme Council of 
India. This place he held till 1838, and the munificent salary 
attached to it (^10,000) gave him the independence needful for 
the carrying-out of his great literary work, the " History of Eng- 
land." His "Essays," by which he is best known to the general 
reader, were many of them of the nature of preliminary historical 
studies. Before his political preferment, these pieces had served 
to increase Macaulay's slender income : those written after his 
return from India were the outcome of choice and greater leisure. 

Macaulay reentered Parliament in 1839, — this time as mem- 
ber for Edinburgh, — and became secretary of war in Melbourne's 
ministry. In 1846 he was paymaster-general, as Chatham had 
been before him. 

The first two volumes of his " History " appeared in 1848, and 
were followed by two more in 1855. Two years later he was 



IN TROD UCTION. 5 

raised to the peerage. He died of heart disease in December, 
1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets' Corner, 
near the statue of Addison. 

Macaulay lacked some of the traits we are accustomed to look 
for in lofty natures. We are told that he was ignorant of the 
deeper emotions ; that his sensibilities were not delicate ; that he 
lacked piety of mind, had no sympathy with high speculation, 
and displayed but little interest even in the practical problems of 
science and social life. On the other hand, his virtues were 
many and great. He was an affectionate friend, and blameless, 
unselfish, and magnanimous in every relation of life. His nature 
was simple, manly, and straightforward. He hated lies, liars, 
and all evil ; and one of the reasons he is never dull is that he 
was deeply in earnest in all he wrote. 

Macaulay's powers of memory were very great, and the extent 
of his reading has perhaps never been exceeded. Like Johnson, 
Coleridge, and other men of great information, he was an exuber- 
ant talker ; and like most men who talk well, he was, it may be, 
but a poor listener. In one of Mrs. Carlyle's letters, she pays 
the historian the doubtful compliment of saying, " I used to think 
my husband the most copious talker, when he liked, that was 
anywhere to be fallen in with ; but Macaulay beats him hollow 
— in quantity." Of Coleridge, we are told by De Quincey that 
his friend used to stipulate for no interruptions to his table-talk 
as the first condition of his dining out. Coleridge was a talker, 
not a conversationalist. Macaulay talked as much as Coleridge 
ever did ; but London society listened gladly to his discourse, 
brightened at every turn by " images from the poets, shrewd 
thrusts from the satirists, wise saws from sages, and pleasantries 
from the humorists." It is a pity we have no record of these 



b INTRODUCTION. 

talks, for it is said that Macaulay talked very much as he wrote, 

and no one thinks that he wrote too much. 

His fame rests on his " Lays of Ancient Rome," his " History," 
and his " Essays." It is with the last that we are here concerned. 
Though the titles of the " Essays " suggest biography, most of 
them are in fact detached chapters of history. The Second Essay 
on Chatham — the text of the following pages — discloses in 
every paragraph Macaulay's marvelous mastery of historic detail. 
Here and there are stately and melodious passages ; yet the very 
minuteness of the account, with its array of dates, names, and 
titles, sensibly jolts and impedes the progress of the piece. 

Examples of Macaulay's more fluent manner are afforded by 
his essay on " Sir William Temple " and by his " Milton." It is 
customary to speak of his early style as florid ; and Macaulay 
himself declared in later life that his " Milton " was " overloaded 
with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." But just as the first form 
in which one would cast a thought is often the best, so it will 
frequently happen that the earliest work of a great artist has 
characteristic excellences that the refinement of maturity cannot 
replace. It was not without reason that the essay on " Milton " 
drew all eyes upon the writer of it. 

Macaulay's style is the most original thing about him. By it 
he was able to give to written language a good share of the glow 
and rush of spoken oratory. Critics have pointed to his wealth 
of epithet, the rhythm of his periods, and the masterly unity of 
each of his pieces. Yet beyond the reach of analysis there re- 
mains a something that is Macaulay's that cannot be defined. 
" You will ask science in vain to tell you," says Saintsbury, 
" why some dozen or sixteen of the simplest words in language 
arranged by one man in one fashion make a permanent addition 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

to the delight of the world, while other words differently arranged 
by another do not." 

The most eminent of later English historians, Freeman, says of 
Macaulay's writing : " He is a model of style, — of style not merely 
as a kind of luxury, but of style in its practical aspect. ... I 
learned from him that if I wished to be understood by others, or 
indeed by myself, I must avoid, not always long sentences, — for 
long sentences may often be perfectly clear, — but involved, com- 
plicated, parenthetical sentences. I learned that I must avoid 
sentences crowded with relatives and participles, — sentences in 
which things are not so much directly stated as implied in some 
dark and puzzling fashion. I learned, also, never to be afraid 
of using the same word or name over and over again, if by that 
means anything could be added to clearness or force. Macaulay 
never goes on, like some writers, talking about ' the former ' and 
'the latter,' 'he, she, it, they,' through clause after clause, while 
his reader has to look back to see which of several persons it 
is that is so darkly referred to. No doubt a pronoun, like any 
other word, may often be repeated with advantage, if it is per- 
fectly clear who is meant by the noun ; and with Macaulay's 
pronouns it is always perfectly clear who is meant by them. . . . 
The care which Macaulay took to write, before all things, good 
and clear English, may be followed by writers who make no at- 
tempt to imitate his style, and who may be led by nature to some 
quite different style of their own. In every language and in 
every kind of writing, purity of speech, and clearness of expres- 
sion, must be the first virtues of all." 

William Pitt was born at Westminster in 1708. He died at 
the age of seventy, having been for twenty years the greatest 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

figure in English public life. To distinguish him from his illus- 
trious son and namesake, he is commonly referred to by his title. 
When, in 1766, he became first Earl of Chatham, he divested 
himself, as Macaulay points out in a following page, of that far 
higher title of " the Great Commoner," which an admiring nation 
had conferred upon him. 

The life of this great man is of interest to lovers of liberty 
and law everywhere. To us Americans, who live under the 
Constitution of 1787, whatever relates to the career of the Eng- 
lish statesman who " rejoiced that America had resisted " must 
have an interest deeper still. The accompanying Second Essay 
of Macaulay outlines the political life of Chatham after the year 
1760. Only the salient features of his earlier career can here be 
indicated. 

Pitt was educated at Oxford, where he was distinguished rather 
for his extensive reading and information than for any special 
attainments. His university studies were cut short by a severe 
attack of gout. This disease had tortured him even in boyhood ; 
he was never wholly free from it ; and it was the cause of his 
death in 1778. 

In 1735 young Pitt entered Parliament for the famous rotten, 
borough of Old Sarum. He inherited this seat, as he may have 
inherited the gout, from his grandfather, Thomas Pitt, who was 
at one time governor of Madras, and who, out of the wealth this 
post brought him, had purchased the tenure of the borough. 

In Parliament Pitt allied himself at once with the Whig oppo- 
sition. Among his most effective speeches were several against 
the Hanoverian subsidies, — the substance of which he afterward 
recanted, — and those in which, in 1742, he urged the investiga- 
tion of Walpole's administration. Only the general tenor of these 



IN TROD UCTION. 9 

speeches is known. The familiar and famous oration in which 
he pleaded guilty to " the atrocious crime of being a young man," 
— a supposed sneer of Walpole's, — was never delivered by Pitt. 
It was, like other celebrated speeches, written by Samuel Johnson 
in his " Parliamentary Reports " for the " Gentleman's Magazine." 

In 1746 Pitt was appointed paymaster-general of the forces, 
under the administration of the Pelhams. The rich perquisites 
of this place consisted of interest on public moneys while in hand, 
and of a commission on all foreign subsidies. These perquisites 
had been pocketed without question by all previous paymasters- 
general. Pitt, though poor, — he was a younger son, — refused 
to draw a shilling from his office beyond the salary legally attach- 
ing to it. This refusal was well calculated to call forth, in that 
age of venal statesmen, the popular confidence which at once 
followed upon it. 

In 1754 Pitt married Lady Hester Grenville, the sister of 
George Grenville and of the first Earl Temple. Macaulay fre- 
quently refers to the political bearings of this alliance. In 1757 
the famous coalition ministry of Pitt and Newcastle was formed, 
with Pitt as secretary of state for foreign affairs. This cabinet 
held together for four years ; and it was during Pitt's adminis- 
tration that England achieved her greatest successes in India, 
Europe, and America. The following essay takes up at this point 
the subject of his later career. 

Pitt was a man of penetrating intelligence, resolute courage, 
promptitude, self-command, and firmness of purpose. In his 
administration of foreign affairs he was an enthusiastic patriot, 
having the sole purpose of promoting the welfare and influence 
of England. To this end all the energies of his nature were con- 
stantly directed. Nothing restrained his arrogance in dealing 



I o INTR OD UC TION. 

with foreign nations, and in many ways he was deserving of the 

epithet of " dictator " applied to him by Dr. Johnson. 

It has been said that the theme afforded by Chatham's public 
life was especially congenial to Macaulay. The historian's own 
nature was firm and courageous ; and courage and firmness were 
virtues that, when exhibited in the lives of other men, as in Chat- 
ham and Clive, kindled in him a special fervor. Yet Macaulay 
could call Chatham " vain and resentful," " an actor in the closet, 
at council, and in Parliament." And it is probable that the esti- 
mate of Pitt that is to be found in the two essays is the finest 
example of balanced judgments that Macaulay has left us. 

He began the first of these sketches by saying, "All who em- 
ploy themselves in illustrating the lives of others are peculiarly 
exposed to the disease of admiration." These words of judicious 
caution have not sufficed to deter later historians from indiscrim- 
inating eulogy of Lord Chatham. His real achievements were 
very great, and by these his title to greatness was long ago fixed. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 1 



MORE than ten years ago we commenced a sketch of the 
political life of the great Lord Chatham. 2 We then stopped 
at the death of George II., with the intention of speedily resum- 
ing our task. Circumstances, which it would be tedious to ex- 
plain, long prevented us from carrying this intention into effect. 
Nor can we regret the delay, for the materials which were within 
our reach in 1834 were scanty and unsatisfactory when compared 
with those which we at present possess. 3 Even now, though we 
have had access to some valuable sources of information which 
have not yet been opened to the public, we cannot but feel that 
the history of the first ten years of the reign of George III. is but 
imperfectly known to us ; nevertheless we are inclined to think 
that we are in a condition to lay before our readers a narrative 
neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. We therefore return with 
pleasure to our long-interrupted labor. 

We left Pitt in the zenith of prosperity and glory, the idol of 
England, the terror of France, the admiration of the whole civil- 
ized world. 4 The wind, from whatever quarter it blew, carried to 

1 From the Edinburgh Review, October, 1844. This is the last essay 
that Macaulay wrote for that periodical. 

2 Edinburgh Review, January, 1834. 

3 This essay was in theory a " review " of Pitt's Correspondence, and of 
the Letters of Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, then recently republished. 

4 With Pitt as secretary of state for foreign affairs, the French power in 
Canada and in India had been broken; and when George II. died, in 1760, 
England was the first maritime and colonial power in the world. 



12 MACAU LAY. 

England tidings of battles won, fortresses taken, provinces added 
to the empire. At home factions had sunk into a lethargy, such 
as had never been known since the great religious schism of the 
sixteenth century ' had roused the public mind from repose. 

In order that the events which we have to relate may be 
clearly understood, it may be desirable that we should advert to 
the causes which had for a time suspended the animation of both 
the great English parties. 

If, rejecting all that is merely accidental, we look at the essen- 
tial characteristics of the Whig and the Tory, we may consider 
each of them as the representative of a great principle, essential 
to the welfare of nations. One is in an especial manner the 
guardian of liberty ; and the other, of order. One is the moving 
power, and the other the steadying power of the state. One is 
the sail, without which society would make no progress ; the 
other, the ballast, without which there would be small safety in a 
tempest. But, during the forty-six years which followed the ac- 
cession of the House of Hanover, 2 these distinctive peculiarities 
seemed to be effaced. The Whig conceived that he could not 
better serve the cause of civil and religious freedom than by 
strenuously supporting the Protestant dynasty: the Tory con- 
ceived that he could not better prove his hatred of revolutions 
than by attacking a government to which a revolution had given 
birth. 3 Both came by degrees to attach more importance to the 
means than to the end ; both were thrown into unnatural situa- 
tions ; and both, like animals transported to an uncongenial cli- 
mate, languished and degenerated. The Tory, removed from the 

i The abolition of the papal power in England, and the establishment of 
the Anglican Church. 

2 By the Act of Settlement of 1701, the succession to the English crown 
was secured, next after Anne, to Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, and her 
Protestant descendants. Accordingly, upon the death of Queen Anne in 
1 7 14, George Lewis of Brunswick, the Elector of Hanover, became George I. 
of England. The reigning family are his descendants. 

3 The revolution of 1688, when Parliament adopted the famous Bill of 
Rights, curtailing the powers of the Crown. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 13 

sunshine of the court, was as a camel in the snows of Lapland : 
the Whig, basking in the rays of royal favor, was as a reindeer in 
the sands of Arabia. 

Dante tells us l that he saw, in Malebolge, a strange encounter 
between a human form and a serpent. The enemies, after cruel 
wounds inflicted, stood for a time glaring on each other. A great 
cloud surrounded them, and then a wonderful metamorphosis 
began. Each creature was transfigured into the likeness of its 
antagonist. The serpent's tail divided itself into two legs : the 
man's legs intertwined themselves into a tail. The body of the 
serpent put forth arms : the arms of the man shrank into his 
body. At length the serpent stood up a man, and spake : the 
man sank down a serpent, and glided, hissing, away. Some- 
thing like this was the transformation which, during the reign of 
George I., 2 befell the two English parties. Each gradually took 
the shape and color of its foe, till at length the Tory rose up 
erect the zealot of freedom, and the Whig crawled and licked the 
dust at the feet of power. 

It is true, that when these degenerate politicians discussed 
questions merely speculative, and, above all, when they discussed 
questions relating to the conduct of their own grandfathers, they 
still seemed to differ as their grandfathers had differed. The 
Whig, who during three Parliaments had never given one vote 
against the court, and who was ready to sell his soul for the comp- 
troller's staff or for the Great Wardrobe, still professed to draw 
his political doctrines from Locke and Milton ; still worshiped 
the memory of Pym and Hampden ; and would still, on the 30th 
of January, take his glass, first to the man in the mask, and then 
to the man who would do it without a mask. 3 The Tory, on the 

1 Inferno, canto xxv., lines 41-131. 

2 George I. reigned from 1714 to 1727; George II., from 1727 to 1760. 

3 Pym and Hampden in Parliament, and Milton with the pen, were the 
most influential upholders of the Commonwealth (1649-59). Akin to their 
free and inquisitive minds was the spirit of Locke, but his politics and politi- 
cal writings belonged to a somewhat later period. Charles I. was beheaded 
Jan. 30, 1649, the headsman being masked, as was then the custom. 



14 MACAULAY. 

other hand, while he reviled the mild and temperate Walpole as 
a deadly enemy of liberty, could see nothing to reprobate in the 
iron tyranny of Strafford and Laud. 1 But, whatever judgment 
the Whig or the Tory of that age might pronounce on transactions 
long past, there can be no doubt, that, as respected the practical 
questions then pending, the Tory was a reformer, and indeed an 
intemperate and indiscreet reformer, while the Whig was con- 
servative even to bigotry. 2 We have ourselves seen similar effects 
produced in a neighboring country by similar causes. Who 
would have believed, fifteen years ago, 3 that M. Guizot and M. 
Villemain would have to defend property and social order against 
the attacks of such enemies as M. Genoude and M. de La Roche 
Jaquelin? 

Thus the successors of the old Cavaliers had turned dema- 
gogues : the successors of the old Roundheads had turned 
courtiers. Yet was it long before their mutual animosity began 
to abate, for it is the nature of parties to retain their original 
enmities far more firmly than their original principles. During 
many years, a generation of Whigs, whom Sidney would have 
spurned as slaves, continued to wage deadly war with a generation 
of Tories whom Jeffreys would have hanged for republicans. 4 

Through the whole reign of George I., and through nearly half 
of the reign of George II., a Tory was regarded as an enemy of 
the reigning house, and was excluded from all the favors of the 
Crown. Though most of the country gentlemen were Tories, 

1 Strafford and Laud were aggressive supporters of royal prerogative as 
against the Parliament, and both suffered death for treason to the Common- 
wealth. Sir Robert Walpole was (Whig) prime-minister from 1721 to 1742. 

2 This passage used to be cited to correct the once common prejudice 
against Macaulay, that he was to the last a narrow and bitter Whig. 

3 That is, before the revolution of 1830. 

4 Algernon Sidney had applauded the execution of Charles I. Jeffreys, 
the " infamous judge," was a creature of Charles II. This powerful illus- 
tration of Macaulay's derives much of its force from the fact that it was Jef- 
freys who in 1683 pronounced upon Sidney sentence of death, the outcome 
of a mock-trial for treasonable conspiracy against the King. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. *5 

none but Whigs were created peers and baronets. Though most 
of the clergy were Tories, none but Whigs were appointed deans 
and bishops. In every county, opulent and well-descended Tory 
squires complained that their names were left out of the commis- 
sion of the peace, 1 while men of small estate and mean birth, who 
were for toleration and excise, septennial parliaments and stand- 
ing armies, presided at quarter sessions, and became deputy-lieu- 
tenants. 

By degrees some approaches were made towards a reconcilia- 
tion. While Walpole was at the head of affairs, enmity to his 
power induced a large and powerful body of Whigs, headed by 
the heir-apparent 2 of the throne, to make an alliance with the 
Tories, and a truce even with the Jacobites. 3 After Sir Robert's 
fall, 4 the ban which lay on the Tory party was taken off. The 
chief places in the administration continued to be filled by Whigs, 
and, indeed, could scarcely have been filled otherwise ; for the 
Tory nobility and gentry, though strong in numbers and in prop- 
erty, had among them scarcely a single man distinguished by tal- 
tnts, either for business or for debate. A few of them, however, 
were admitted to subordinate offices ; and this indulgence pro- 
duced a softening effect on the temper of the whole body. The 
first levee of George II. after Walpole's resignation was a re- 
markable spectacle. Mingled with the constant supporters of 
the House of Brunswick, 5 with the Russells, the Cavendishes, 
and the Pelhams, appeared a crowd of faces utterly unknown to 
the pages and gentleman ushers, lords of rural manors, whose ale 
and foxhounds were renowned in the neighborhood of the Men- 
dip hills, or round the Wrekin, 6 but who had never crossed the 

1 A commission under the great seal constituting one or more persons 
justices of the peace. 

2 Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. 

3 From the Latin Jacobus (" James ") ; the adherents of James II. after 
his abdication, or of his descendants. 

4 In 1742. s See Note 3, p. 12. 

6 Hills in Somersetshire and Shropshire, both of which counties are re- 
mote from the capital. 



1 6 MACAU LAY. 

threshold of the palace since the days when Oxford, with the 
white staff in his hand, stood behind Queen Anne. 1 

During the eighteen years which followed this day, both fac- 
tions were gradually sinking deeper and deeper into repose. The 
apathy of the public mind is partly to be ascribed to the unjust 
violence with which the administration of Walpole had been 
assailed. In the body politic, as in the natural body, morbid 
languor generally succeeds morbid excitement. The people had 
been maddened by sophistry, by calumny, by rhetoric, by stimu- 
lants applied to the national pride. In the fullness of bread, they 
had raved as if famine had been in the land. While enjoying 
such a measure of civil and religious freedom as, till then, no 
great society had ever known, they had cried out for a Timoleon 
or a Brutus 2 to stab their oppressor to the heart. They were in 
this frame of mind when the change of administration took place ; 
and they soon found that there was to be no change whatever in 
the system of government. The natural consequences followed. 
To frantic zeal succeeded sullen indifference. The cant of pa- 
triotism had not merely ceased to charm the public ear, but had 
become as nauseous as the cant of Puritanism after the downfall 
of the Rump. 3 The hot fit was over ; the cold fit had begun : 
and it was long before seditious arts, or even real grievances, 
could bring back the fiery paroxysm which had run its course and 
reached its termination. 

Two attempts were made to disturb this tranquillity : the ban- 
ished heir of the House of Stuart 4 headed a rebellion ; the dis- 
contented heir of the House of Brunswick headed an opposition. 
Both the rebellion and the opposition came to nothing. The 

1 That is, since the accession of the House of Hanover. The -white staff 
is the lord high treasurer's badge of office. 

2 Zealots in the cause of liberty who conspired against and assisted in the 
assassination of their civil rulers, — Timoleon of his elder brother Timophanes, 
and Brutus of his friend Caesar. 

» That is, the so-called Rump Parliament of the Commonwealth. 
4 Charles Edward Stuart, grandson of James II. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 33 

commence in all probability by civil war, 1 and, if consummated, 
must be consummated by the establishment of absolute mon- 
archy. Or was the patriot King to carry the House of Commons 
with him in his upright designs? By what means? Interdicting 
himself from the use of corrupt influence, what motive was he to 
address to the Dodingtons and Winningtons? 2 Was cupidity, 
strengthened by habit, to be laid asleep by a few fine sentences 
about virtue and union? 

Absurd as this theory was, it had many admirers, particularly 
among men of letters. It was now to be reduced to practice ; 
and the result was, as any man of sagacity must have foreseen, 
the most piteous and ridiculous of failures. 

On the very day of the young King's accession appeared some 
signs which indicated the approach of a great change. The 
speech which he made to his council was not submitted to the 
cabinet. It was drawn up by Bute, and contained some expres- 
sions which might be construed into reflections on the conduct 
of affairs during the late reign. Pitt remonstrated, and begged 
that these expressions might be softened down in the printed 
copy ; but it was not till after some hours of altercation that 
Bute yielded ; and, even after Bute had yielded, the King affected 
to hold out till the following afternoon. On the same day on 
which this singular contest took place, Bute was not only sworn 
of the privy council, but introduced into the cabinet. 

Soon after this, Lord Holdernesse, one of the secretaries of 
state, in pursuance of a plan concerted with the Court, resigned 
the seals. Bute was instantly appointed to the vacant place. A 
general election speedily followed, and the new secretary entered 

1 This passage is an allusion to the civil war of the previous century, 
which was largely clue to the forced loans and illegal taxes of Charles I. 
The famous ship-moneys were levies for the naval defense of the country, 
imposed in 1634 on the coast towns, and in 1635-36 on the whole of Eng- 
land. 

2 Ringleaders in parliamentary corruption. Dodington (Lord Melcombe) 
published a Diary, which affords " an admirable picture of himself, and an 
instructive lesson for future statesmen." 



34 MACAULAY. 

Parliament in the only way in which he then could enter it, as 
one of the sixteen representative peers of Scotland. 1 

Had the ministers been firmly united, it can scarcely be 
doubted that they would have been able to withstand the Court. 
The parliamentary influence of the Whig aristocracy, combined 
with the genius, the virtue, and the fame of Pitt, would have 
been irresistible. But there had been in the cabinet of George 
II. latent jealousies and enmities, which now began to show 
themselves. Pitt had been estranged from his old ally Legge, 
the chancellor of the exchequer. Some of the ministers were 
envious of Pitt's popularity ; others were, not altogether without 
cause, disgusted by his imperious and haughty demeanor ; others, 
again, were honestly opposed to some parts of his policy. They 
admitted that he had found the country in the depths of humilia- 
tion, and had raised it to the height of glory ; they admitted that 
he had conducted the war with energy, ability, and splendid suc- 
cess ; but they began to hint that the drain on the resources of 
the state was unexampled, and that the public debt was increas- 
ing with a speed at which Montague or Godolphin 2 would have 
stood aghast. Some of the acquisitions made by our fleets and 
armies were, it was acknowledged, profitable as well as honor- 
able; but, now that George II. was dead, a courtier might ven- 
ture to ask why England was to become a party in a dispute 
between two German powers. What was it to her whether the 
House of Hapsburg or the House of Brandenburg ruled in Silesia? 
Why were the best English regiments fighting on the Main? 
Why were the Prussian battalions paid with English gold? The 
great minister seemed to think it beneath him to calculate the 

1 By the treaty of Union in 1707 the peerage of Scotland was to be repre- 
sented by sixteen of its number, chosen for each Parliament by the Scottish 
peers themselves. By a resolution of the House of Lords four years later, 
a patent of peerage of the United Kingdom granted to a Scottish peer carried 
with it no right to a seat in Parliament. 

2 That is, that expenditures were without precedent. Montague and Go- 
dolphin were finance ministers in the reigns of James II., William III., and 
Anne. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 35 

price of victory. As long as the Tower guns were fired, as the 
streets were illuminated, as French banners were carried in tri- 
umph through London, it was to him matter of indifference to 
what extent the public burdens were augmented. Nay, he 
seemed to glory in the magnitude of those sacrifices which the 
people, fascinated by his eloquence and success, had too readily 
made, and would long and bitterly regret. There was no check 
on waste or embezzlement. Our commissaries returned from the 
camp of Prince Ferdinand 1 to buy boroughs, to rear palaces, to 
rival the magnificence of the old aristocracy of the realm. Al- 
ready had we borrowed, in four years of war, more than the most 
skillful and economical government would pay in forty years of 
peace. But the prospect of peace was as remote as ever. It 
could not be doubted that France, smarting and prostrate, would 
consent to fair terms of accommodation ; but this was not what 
P.tt wanted. War had made him powerful and popular ; with 
war all that was brightest in his life was associated ; for war his 
talents were peculiarly fitted. He had at length begun to love 
war for its own sake, and was more disposed to quarrel with 
neutrals than to make peace with enemies. 

Such were the views of the Duke of Bedford and of the Earl 
of Hardwicke ; but no member of the government held these 
opinions so strongly as George Grenville, the treasurer of the 
navy. George Grenville was brother-in-law of Pitt, and had al- 
ways been reckoned one of Pitt's personal and political friends ; 
but it is difficult to conceive two men of talents and integrity 
more utterly unlike each other. Pitt, as his sister often said, 
knew nothing accurately except Spenser's " Fairy Queen." He 
had never applied himself steadily to any branch of knowledge. 

1 Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, appointed by George II. to the 
command of the allied forces in the Seven- Years' War. His most famous 
victory over the French was that at Minden in 1759. The efforts of France 
upon the Continent prevented her from attending properly to her interests 
elsewhere, — in India and in Canada. It was the well-known policy of Pitt 
to " conquer America in Germany." 



36 MACAULAY. 

He was a wretched financier. He never became familiar even 
with the rules of that House of which he was the brightest orna- 
ment. He had never studied public law as a system, and was, 
indeed, so ignorant of the whole subject, that George II. on one 
occasion complained bitterly that a man who had never read 
Vattel should presume to undertake the direction of foreign 
affairs. 1 But these defects were more than redeemed by high 
and rare gifts ; by a strange power of inspiring great masses of 
men with confidence and affection ; by an eloquence which not 
only delighted the ear, but stirred the blood, and brought tears 
into the eyes, by originality in devising plans, by vigor in exe- 
cuting them. Grenville, on the other hand, was by nature and 
habit a man of details. He had been bred a lawyer, and he had 
brought the industry and acuteness of the Temple 2 into official 
and parliamentary life. He was supposed to be intimately ac- 
quainted with the whole fiscal system of the country. He had 
paid especial attention to the law of Parliament, and was so 
learned in all things relating to the privileges and orders of the 
House of Commons that those who loved him least pronounced 
him the only person competent to succeed Onslow in the chair. 3 
His speeches were generally instructive, and sometimes, from the 
gravity and earnestness with which he spoke, even impressive, 
but never brilliant, and generally tedious. Indeed, even when he 
was at the head of affairs, he sometimes found it difficult to ob- 
tain the ear of the House. In disposition, as well as in intellect, 
he differed widely from his brother-in-law. Pitt was utterly re- 
gardless of money: he would scarcely stretch out his hand to 
take it ; and when it came, he threw it away with childish pro- 
fusion. Grenville, though strictly upright, was grasping and 

1 Vattel's Law of Nations was published in 1758. This work, from the 
pen of a contemporary who was also a German, would quite naturally be over- 
estimated and overquoted by George II. 

2 The law-college, built on the site of a house of the Knights Templars of 
the middle ages. 

a As speaker of the House of Commons. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 37 

parsimonious. Pitt was a man of excitable nerves, sanguine in 
hope, easily elated by success and popularity, keenly sensible of 
injury, but prompt to forgive. Grenville's character was stern, 
melancholy, and pertinacious. Nothing was more remarkable in 
him than his inclination always to look on the dark side of things. 
He was the raven of the House of Commons, always croaking 
defeat in the midst of triumphs, and bankruptcy with an over- 
flowing exchequer. Burke, with general applause, compared 
him, in a time of quiet and plenty, to the evil spirit whom Ovid 
described l looking down on the stately temples and wealthy haven 
of Athens, and scarce able to refrain from weeping because she 
could find nothing at which to weep. Such a man was not likely 
to be popular. But to unpopularity Grenville opposed a dogged 
determination, which sometimes forced even those who hated 
him to respect him. 

It was natural that Pitt and Grenville, being such as they were, 
should take very different views of the situation of affairs. Pitt 
could see nothing but the trophies : Grenville could see nothing 
but the bill. Pitt boasted that England was victorious at once 
in America, in India, and in Germany, the umpire of the Conti- 
nent, the mistress of the sea : Grenville cast up the subsidies, 
sighed over the army extraordinaries, and groaned in spirit to 
think that the nation had borrowed eight millions in one year. 

With a ministry thus divided, it was not difficult for Bute to 
deal. Legge was the first who fell. Pie had given offense to 
the young King in the late reign by refusing to support a creature 
of Bute at a Hampshire election. He was now not only turned 
out, but in the closet, 2 when he delivered up his seal of office, 
was treated with gross incivility. 

Pitt, who did not love Legge, saw this event with indifference. 
But the danger was now fast approaching himself. Charles III. 
of Spain had early conceived a deadly hatred of England. 
Twenty years before, when he was King of the Two Sicilies, he 

1 The reference is to Metamorphoses, ii. 794. 

2 The private council-chamber. 



38 A/A CA ULA Y. 

had been eager to join the coalition against Maria Theresa : but 
an English fleet had suddenly appeared in the Bay of Naples ; an 
English captain had landed, 1 had proceeded to the palace, had 
laid a watch on the table, and had told his Majesty that within 
an hour a treaty of neutrality must be signed, or a bombardment 
would commence. The treaty was signed, the squadron sailed 
out of the bay twenty-four hours after it had sailed in, and from 
that day the ruling passion of the humbled prince was aversion 
to the English name. He was at length in a situation in which 
he might hope to gratify that passion. He had recently become 
King of Spain and the Indies. 2 He saw with envy and appre- 
hension the triumphs of our navy, and the rapid extension of our 
colonial empire. He was a Bourbon, and sympathized with the 
distress of the house from which he sprang. He was a Spaniard ; 
and no Spaniard could bear to see Gibraltar and Minorca in the 
possession of a foreign power. Impelled by such feelings, Charles 
concluded a secret treaty with France. By this treaty, known as 
the " Family Compact," the two powers bound themselves, not 
in express words, but by the clearest implication, to make war on 
England in common. Spain postponed the declaration of hostili- 
ties only till her fleet, laden with the treasures of America, should 
have arrived. 

The existence of the treaty could not be kept a secret from 
Pitt. He acted as a man of his capacity and energy might be 
expected to act. He at once proposed to declare war against 
Spain, and to intercept the American fleet. He had determined, 
it is said, to attack without delay both Havana and the Philip- 
pines. 

His wise and resolute counsel was rejected. Bute was fore- 
most in opposing it, and was supported by almost the whole cabi- 
net. Some of the ministers doubted, or affected to doubt, the 

1 Commodore Martin, in 1741- 

2 The Spanish West Indies were at this time taken to include not only the 
whole archipelago, but also Florida and the mainland from Mexico to Peru. 
Spain's East Indian possessions were relatively of little consequence. 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 39 

correctness of Pitt's intelligence ; some shrank from the responsi- 
bility of advising a course so bold and decided as that which he 
proposed ; some were weary of his ascendency, and were glad to 
be rid of him on any pretext. One only of his colleagues agreed 
with him, — his brother-in-law, Earl Temple. 

Pitt and Temple resigned their offices. To Pitt the young 
King behaved at parting in the most gracious manner. Pitt, who, 
proud and fiery everywhere else, was always meek and humble in 
the closet, was moved even to tears. The King and the favorite 
urged him to accept some substantial mark of royal gratitude. 
Would he like to be appointed governor of Canada? A salary 
of five thousand pounds a year should be annexed to the office. 
Residence would not be required. It was true that the governor 
of Canada, as the law then stood, could not be a member of the 
House of Commons ; but a bill should be brought in, authorizing 
Pitt to hold his government together with a seat in Parliament, 
and in the preamble should be set forth his claims to the grati- 
tude of his country. Pitt answered, with all delicacy, that his 
anxieties were rather for his wife and family than for himself, and 
that nothing would be so acceptable to him as a mark of royal 
goodness which might be beneficial to those who were dearest 
to him. The hint was taken. The same " Gazette ' n which an- 
nounced the retirement of the secretary of state announced also, 
that, in consideration of his great public services, his wife had 
been created a peeress in her own right, and that a pension of 
three thousand pounds a year, for three lives, had been bestowed 
on himself. It was doubtless thought that the rewards and 
honors conferred on the great minister would have a conciliatory 
effect on the public mind. Perhaps, too, it was thought that his 
popularity, which had partly arisen from the contempt which he 
had always shown for money, would be damaged by a pension ; 
and, indeed, a crowd of libels instantly appeared, in which he was 
accused of having sold his country. Many of his true friends 

1 The London Gazette is, and has been for two centuries, the official organ 
of the government. 



4° MACAULAY. 

thought that he would have best consulted the dignity of his 
character by refusing to accept any pecuniary reward from the 
Court. Nevertheless, the general opinion of his talents, virtues, 
and services remained unaltered. Addresses were presented to 
him from several large towns. London showed its admiration 
and affection in a still more marked manner. Soon after his 
resignation came the lord-mayor's day. The King and the royal 
family dined at Guildhall. Pitt was one of the guests. The 
young sovereign, seated by his bride in his state coach, received 
a remarkable lesson. He was scarcely noticed. All eyes were 
fixed on the fallen minister, all acclamations directed to him. 
The streets, the balconies, the chimney-tops, burst into a roar of 
delight as his chariot passed by. The ladies waved their hand- 
kerchiefs from the windows. The common people clung to the 
wheels, shook hands with the footmen, and even kissed the 
horses. Cries of "No Bute!" "No Newcastle salmon!" 1 were 
mingled with the shouts of "Pitt forever!" When Pitt entered 
Guildhall, he was welcomed by loud huzzas and clapping c\ 
hands, in which the very magistrates of the city joined. Lord s 
Bute, in the mean time, was hooted and pelted through Cheap- 
side, and would, it was thought, have been in some danger if he 
had not taken the precaution of surrounding his carriage with a 
strong body-guard of boxers. Many persons blamed the con- 
duct of Pitt on this occasion as disrespectful to the King. In- 
deed, Pitt himself afterwards owned that he had done wrong. 
He was led into this error, as he was afterwards led into more 
serious errors, by the influence of his turbulent and mischievous 
brother-in-law, Temple. 

The events which immediately followed Pitt's retirement raised 
his fame higher than ever. War with Spain proved to be, as he 
had predicted, inevitable. News came from the West Indies 
that Martinique had been taken by an expedition which he had 

1 This slur on Pitt's late colleague was merely a dull and contemptuous 
simile. The Tyne salmon-catch is the largest in England, and the name of 
Newcastle would easily suggest the phrase. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 41 

sent forth. Havana fell, and it was known that he had planned 
an attack on Havana. Manila capitulated, and it was believed 
that he had meditated a blow against Manila. The American 
fleet, which he had proposed to intercept, had unloaded an im- 
mense cargo of bullion in the haven of Cadiz, before Bute could 
be convinced that the Court of Madrid really entertained hostile 
intentions. 

The session of Parliament which followed Pitt's retirement 
passed over without any violent storm. Lord Bute took on him- 
self the most prominent part in the House of Lords. He had 
become secretary of state, and indeed prime-minister, without 
having once opened his lips in public, except as an actor. There 
was therefore no small curiosity to know how he would acquit 
himself. Members of the House of Commons crowded the bar 
of the Lords, and covered the steps of the throne. It was gen- 
erally expected that the orator would break down, but his most 
malicious hearers were forced to own that he had made a better 
figure than they expected. They, indeed, ridiculed his action as 
theatrical, and his style as tumid. They were especially amused 
by the long pauses which, not from hesitation, but from affecta- 
tion, he made at all the emphatic words ; and Charles Townshend 
cried out, " Minute guns! " The general opinion, however, was, 
that, if Bute had been early practiced in debate, he might have 
become an impressive speaker. 

In the Commons, George Grenville had been intrusted with the 
lead. The task was not as yet a very difficult one, for Pitt did 
not think fit to raise the standard of opposition. His speeches 
at this time were distinguished, not only by that eloquence in 
which he excelled all his rivals, but also by a temperance and 
a modesty which had too often been wanting to his character. 
When war was declared against Spain, he justly laid claim to the 
merit of having foreseen what had at length become manifest to 
all, but he carefully abstained from arrogant and acrimonious ex- 
pressions ; and this abstinence was the more honorable to him, 
because his temper, never very placid, was now severely tried, 



42 MACAU LAY. 

both by gout and by calumny. The courtiers had adopted a mode 
of warfare which was soon turned with far more formidable 
effect against themselves. Half the inhabitants of the Grub Street 
garrets 1 paid their milk scores, and got their shirts out of pawn, 
by abusing Pitt. His German war, his subsidies, his pension, his 
wife's peerage, were shin of beef and gin, blankets and baskets 
of small coal, to the starving poetasters of the Fleet. Even in 
the House of Commons, he was, on one occasion during this 
session, assailed with an insolence and malice which called forth 
the indignation of men of all parties ; but he endured the outrage 
with majestic patience. In his younger days he had been but 
too prompt to retaliate on those who attacked him ; but now, 
conscious of his great services, and of the space which he filled 
in the eyes of all mankind, he would not stoop to personal squab- 
bles. " This is no season," he said, in a debate on the Spanish 
war, " for altercation and recrimination. A day has arrived when 
every Englishman should stand forth for his country. Arm the 
whole ; be one people ; forget everything but the public. I set 
you the example. Harassed by slanderers, sinking under pain 
and disease, for the public I forget both my wrongs and my in- 
firmities!" On a general review of his life, we are inclined to 
think that his genius and virtue never shone with so pure an 
effulgence as during the session of 1762. 

The session drew towards the close ; and Bute, emboldened 
by the acquiescence of the Houses, resolved to strike another 
great blow, and to become first minister in name as well as in 
reality. That coalition, which a few months before had seemed 
all-powerful, had been dissolved. The retreat of Pitt had de- 
prived the government of popularity. Newcastle had exulted in 
the fall of the illustrious colleague whom he envied and dreaded, 
and had not foreseen that his own doom was at hand. He still 
tried to flatter himself that he was at the head of the government, 
but insults heaped on insults at length undeceived him. Places 

1 A street of London, now Milton Street, where lodged many literary 
hacks, penny-a-liners, and other writers of ephemeral literature. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 43 

which had always been considered as in his gift were bestowed 
without any reference to him. His expostulations only called 
forth significant hints that it was time for him to retire. One 
day he pressed on Bute the claims of a Whig prelate to the arch- 
bishopric of York. " If your grace thinks so highly of him," an- 
swered Bute, " I wonder that you did not promote him when you 
had the power." Still the old man clung with a desperate grasp 
to the wreck. Seldom, indeed, have Christian meekness and 
Christian humility equaled the meekness and humility of his patient 
and abject ambition. At length he was forced to understand that 
all was over. He quitted that court where he had held high 
office during forty-five years, and hid his shame and regret among 
the cedars of Claremont. 1 Bute became first lord of the treasury. 
The favorite had undoubtedly committed a great error. It is 
impossible to imagine a tool better suited to his purposes than 
that which he thus threw away, or, rather, put into the hands of 
his enemies. If Newcastle had been suffered to play at being 
first minister, Bute might securely and quietly have enjoyed the 
substance of power. The gradual introduction of Tories into all 
the departments of the government might have been effected 
without any violent clamor, if the chief of the great Whig con- 
nection had been ostensibly at the head of affairs. This was 
strongly represented to Bute by Lord Mansfield, — a man who 
may justly be called the father of modern Toryism, of Toryism 
modified to suit an order of things under which the House of 
Commons is the most powerful body in the state. The theories 
which had dazzled Bute could not impose on the fine intellect of 
Mansfield. The temerity with which Bute provoked the hostility 
of powerful and deeply rooted interests was displeasing to Mans- 
field's cold and timid nature. Expostulation, however, was vain. 
Bute was impatient of advice, drunk with success, eager to be, in 
show as well as in realicy, the head of the government. He had 
engaged in an undertaking in which a screen was absolutely 

1 Newcastle left office much poorer than when he entered it, refusing a 
proffered pension. 



44 MACAU LAY. 

necessary to his success, and even to his safety. He found an 
excellent screen ready in the very place where it was most needed, 
and he rudely pushed it away. 

And now the new system of government came into full opera- 
tion. For the first time since the accession of the House of 
Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant. The prime-min- 
ister himself was a Tory. Lord Egremont, who had succeeded 
Pitt as secretary of state, was a Tory, and the son of a Tory. 
Sir Francis Dashwood, a man of slender parts, of small experi- 
ence, and cf notoriously immoral character, was made chancellor 
of the exchequer for no reason that could be imagined, except 
that he was a Tory, and had been a Jacobite. The royal house- 
hold was filled with men whose favorite toast, a few years before, 
had been " the King over the water." The relative position of 
the two great national seats of learning was suddenly changed. 
The University of Oxford had long been the chief seat of dis- 
affection. In troubled times the High Street had been lined with 
bayonets, the colleges had been searched by the King's messen- 
gers. Grave doctors were in the habit of talking very Ciceronian 
treason in the theater ; and the undergraduates drank bumpers 
to Jacobite toasts, and chanted Jacobite airs. Of four successive 
chancellors of the university, one had notoriously been in the 
Pretender's service : the other three were fully believed to be in 
secret correspondence with the exiled family. Cambridge had 
therefore been especially lavored by the Hanoverian princes, and 
had shown herself grateful for their patronage. George I. had 
enriched her library , George II. had contributed munificently to 
her Senate House. Bishoprics and deaneries were showered on 
her children. Her chancellor was Newcastle, the chief of the 
Whig aristocracy ; her high steward was Hardwicke, the Whig 
head of the law. Both her burgesses had held office under the 
Whig ministry. Times had now changed. The University of 
Cambridge was received at St. James's with comparative cold- 
ness. The answers to the addresses of Oxford were all gracious- 
ness and warmth. 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 45 

The watchwords of the new government were prerogative and 
purity. The sovereign was no longer to be a puppet in the hands 
of any subject, or of any combination of subjects. George III. 
would not be forced to take ministers whom he disliked, as his 
grandfather had been forced to take Pitt. George III. would 
not be forced to part with any whom he delighted to honor, as 
his grandfather had been forced to part with Garteret. 1 At the 
same time the system of bribery which had grown up during the 
late reigns was to cease. It was ostentatiously proclaimed, that, 
since the accession of the young King, neither constituents nor 
representatives had been bought with the secret-service money. 
To free Britain from corruption and oligarchical cabals, to detach 
her from continental connections, to bring the bloody and ex- 
pensive war with France and Spain to a close, — such were the 
specious objects which Bute professed to procure. 

Some of these objects he attained. England withdrew, at the 
cost of a deep stain on her faith, from her German connections. 
The war with France and Spain was terminated by a peace, 
honorable indeed and advantageous to our country, yet less 
honorable and less advantageous than might have been expected 
from a long and almost unbroken series of victories, by land and 
sea, in every part of the world. But the only effect of Bute's 
domestic administration was to make faction wilder, and corrup- 
tion fouler, than ever. 

The mutual animosity of the Whig and Tory parties had be- 
gun to languish after the fall of Walpole, and had seemed to be 
almost extinct at the close of the reign of George II. It now 
revived in all its force. Many Whigs, it is true, were still in 
office. The Duke of Bedford had signed the treaty with France. 
The Duke of Devonshire, though much out of humor, still con- 

1 Carteret (Earl Granville) was secretary of state under Walpole, who, 
jealous of his abilities and influence, forced his retirement in 1724. Eighteen 
years later Carteret overthrew Walpole, and himself returned to power. 
Chatham declared that he owed all that he was to the friendship and instruc- 
tion of Carteret. 



46 MACAULAY. 

tinued to be lord-chamberlain. Grenville, who led the House 
of Commons, and Fox, who still enjoyed in silence the immense 
gains of the Pay Office, had always been regarded as strong 
Whigs. But the bulk of the party throughout the country re- 
garded the new minister with abhorrence. There was, indeed, 
no want of popular themes for invective against his character. 
He was a favorite, and favorites have always been odious in this 
country. No mere favorite had been at the head of the govern- 
ment since the dagger of Felton had reached the heart of the 
Duke of Buckingham. 1 After that event the most arbitrary and 
the most frivolous of the Stuarts had felt the necessity of confid- 
ing the chief direction of affairs to men who had given some 
proof of parliamentary or official talent. Strafford, Falkland, 
Clarendon, Clifford, Shaftesbury, Lauderdale, Danby, Temple, 
Halifax, Rochester, Sunderland, whatever their faults might be, 
were all men of acknowledged ability. They did not owe their 
eminence merely to the favor of the sovereign. On the contrary, 
they owed the favor of the sovereign to their eminence. Most 
of them, indeed, had first attracted the notice of the Court by the 
capacity and vigor which they had shown in opposition. The 
Revolution seemed to have forever secured the state against the 
domination of a Carr 2 or a Villiers. Now, however, the personal 
regard of the King had at once raised a man who had seen noth- 
ing of public business, who had never opened his lips in Parlia- 
ment, over the heads of a crowd of eminent orators, financiers, 
diplomatists. From a private gentleman, this fortunate minion 
had at once been turned into a secretary of state. He had made 
his maiden speech when at the head of the administration. The 
vulgar resorted to a simple explanation of the phenomenon, and 
the coarsest ribaldry against the princess mother was scrawled on 
every wall and sung in every alley. 

1 Buckingham, referred to below as Villiers, was a personal favorite both 
of James I. and of his son. John Felton assassinated him in 1628 on pre- 
tense of zeal for the public welfare, but in reality to satisfy a private enmity. 

2 Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, an early favorite of James I. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 47 

This was not all. The spirit of party, roused by impolitic 
provocation from its long sleep, roused in turn a still fiercer and 
more malignant Fury, — the spirit of national animosity. The 
grudge of Whig against Tory was mingled with the grudge of 
Englishman against Scot. The two sections of the great British 
people had not yet been indissolubly blended together. The 
events of i 7 1 5 and of 1745 had left painful and enduring traces. 
The tradesmen of Cornhill had been in dread of seeing their tills 
and warehouses plundered by barelegged mountaineers from the 
Grampians. They still recollected that Black Friday, when the 
news came that the rebels were at Derby, 1 when all the shops in 
the city were closed, and when the Bank of England began to 
pay in sixpences. 2 The Scots, on the other hand, remembered, 
with natural resentment, the severity with which the insurgents 
had been chastised, the military outrages, the humiliating laws, 3 
the heads fixed on Temple Bar, the fires and quartering blocks 
on Kennington Common. The favorite did not suffer the Eng- 
lish to forget from what part of the island he came. The cry of 
all the south was that the. public offices, the army, the navy, were 
filled with high-cheeked Drummonds and Erskines, Macdonalds 
and Macgillivrays, who could not talk a Christian tongue, and 
some of whom had but lately begun to wear Christian breeches. 
All the old jokes on hills without trees, girls without stockings, 
men eating the food of horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth 
story, were pointed against these lucky adventurers. To the 
honor of the Scots, it must be said that their prudence and their 
pride restrained them from retaliation. Like the princess in the 
Arabian tale, they stopped their ears tight, and, unmoved by the 

1 Dec. 4, 1745. 

2 An expedient to gain time to effect measures for averting the run upon 
the bank. Payments were made in shillings and sixpences. The principal 
London merchants agreed to receive notes in lieu of gold, and this ended the 
panic. 

3 Especially those prohibiting to the Highland Scots the use of arms and 
the wearing of their distinctive costumes. 



4? MACAULAY. 

shrillest notes of abuse, walked on, without once looking round, 
straight towards the Golden Fountain. 

Bute, who had always been considered as a man of taste and 
reading, affected, from the moment of his elevation, the character 
of a Maecenas. 1 If he expected to conciliate the public by en- 
couraging literature and art, he was grievously mistaken. In- 
deed, none of the objects of his munificence, with the single ex- 
ception of Johnson, can be said to have been well selected ; and 
the public, not unnaturally, ascribed the selection of Johnson 
rather to the doctor's political prejudices than to his literary 
merits: 2 for a wretched scribbler named Shebbeare, who had 
nothing in common with Johnson except violent Jacobitism, and 
who had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Revolution, was 
honored with a mark of royal approbation similar to that which 
was bestowed on the author of the " English Dictionary " and of 
the " Vanity of Human Wishes." It was remarked that Adam, a 
Scotchman, was the court architect, and that Ramsay, a Scotch- 
man, was the court painter, and was preferred to Reynolds. 
Mallet, a Scotchman, of no high literary fame, and of infamous 
character, partook largely of the liberality of the government. 
John Home, a Scotchman, was rewarded for the tragedy of 
'' Douglas " both with a pension and with a sinecure place. But 
when the author 3 of the " Bard " and of the " Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard " ventured to ask for a professorship, the emoluments, 
of which he much needed, and for the duties of which he was in 
many respects better qualified than any man living, he was re- 
fused ; and the post was bestowed on the pedagogue under whose 
care the favorite's son-in-law, Sir James Lowther, had made such 
signal proficiency in the graces and in the humane virtues. 

i Caius Cilnius Maecenas was a Roman statesman, and patron of litera- 
ture and the fine arts, in the first century B.C. 

- This " public" could hardly be expected to recall that Johnson regarded 
the reigning family as usurpers, or to reflect that he had never concealed his 
prejudice against the compatriots of Bute. 

3 Thomas Gray, 1 716-71. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 49 

Thus, the first lord of the treasury was detested by many as a 
Tory, by many as a favorite, and by many as a Scot. All the 
hatred which flowed from these various sources soon mingled, 
and was directed in one torrent of obloquy against the treaty of 
peace. The Duke of Bedford, who had negotiated that treaty, 
was hooted through the streets. Bute was attacked in his chair, 
and was with difficulty rescued by a troop of the guards. He 
could hardly walk the streets in safety without disguising himself. 
A gentleman who died not many years ago used to say that he 
once recognized the favorite earl in the piazza of Covent Garden, 
muffled in a large coat, and with a hat and wig drawn down over 
his brows. His lordship's established type with the mob was a 
jack-boot, a wretched pun on his Christian name 1 and title. A 
jack-boot, generally accompanied by a petticoat, was sometimes 
fastened on a gallows, and sometimes committed to the flames. 
Libels on the Court, exceeding in audacity and rancor any that 
had been published for many years, now appeared daily both in 
prose and verse. Wilkes, with lively insolence, compared the 
mother of George III. to the mother of Edward III., and the 
Scotch minister to the gentle Mortimer. 2 Churchill, with all the 
energy of hatred, deplored the fate of his country, invaded by a 
new race of savages, more cruel and ravenous than the Picts or 
the Danes, the poor, proud children of leprosy 3 and hunger. It 
is a slight circumstance, but deserves to be recorded, that in this 
year pamphleteers first ventured to print at length the names of 
the great men whom they lampooned. George II. had always 

been the K . His ministers had been Sir R W , 

Mr. P , and the Duke of N . But the libelers of George 

i John Stuart. 

2 Isabella, mother of Edward III., was the wife of Edward II. Her in- 
trigue with Roger Mortimer involved the murder of her husband in 1327, 
and Mortimer's execution in the reign of her son. 

3 Leprosy appeared in Britain while it was a Roman colony, became epi- 
demic in Europe during the crusades, but began to decline in the fifteenth 
century. The disease lingered in the Shetland Isles till about a hundred 
years ago. 

4 



50 MACAU LAY. 

III., of the princess mother, and of Lord Bute, did not give 
quarter to a single vowel. 

It was supposed that Lord Temple secretly encouraged the 
most scurrilous assailants of the government. In truth, those 
who knew his habits tracked him as men track a mole. It was 
his nature to grub underground. Whenever a heap of dirt was 
flung up, it might well be suspected that he was at work in some 
foul crooked labyrinth below. Pitt turned away from the filthy 
work of opposition with the same scorn with which he had turned 
away from the filthy work of government. He had the magna- 
nimity to proclaim everywhere the disgust which he felt at the 
insults offered by his own adherents to the Scottish nation, and 
missed no opportunity of extolling the courage and fidelity which 
the Highland regiments had displayed through the whole war. 
But, though he disdained to use any but lawful and honorable 
weapons, it was well known that his fair blows were likely to be 
far more formidable than the privy thrusts of his brother-in-law's 
stiletto. 

Bute's heart began to fail him. The Houses were about to 
meet. The treaty would instantly be the subject of discussion. 
It was probable that Pitt, the great Whig connection, and the 
multitude, would all be on the same side. The favorite had pro- 
fessed to hold in abhorrence those means by which preceding 
ministers had kept the House of Commons in good humor. He 
now began to think that he had been too scrupulous. His 
Utopian visions were at an end. It was necessary not only to 
bribe, but to bribe more shamelessly and flagitiously than his pred- 
ecessors, in order to make up for lost time. A majority must be 
secured, no matter by what means. Could Grenville do this? 
Would he do it? His firmness and ability had not yet been tried 
in any perilous crisis. He had been generally regarded as a 
humble follower of his brother Temple, and of his brother-in-law 
Pitt, and was supposed, though with little reason, to be still 
favorably inclined towards them. Other aid must be called in ; 
and where was other aid to be found? 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 5 1 

There was one man, whose sharp and manly logic had often in 
debate been found a match for the lofty and impassioned rhetoric 
of Pitt, whose talents for jobbing were not inferior to his talents 
for debate, whose dauntless spirit shrank from no difficulty or 
danger, and who was as little troubled with scruples as with fears. 
Henry Fox, or nobody, could weather the storm which was about 
to burst. Yet was he a person to whom the Court, even in that 
extremity, was unwilling to have recourse. He had always been 
regarded as a Whig of the Whigs. He had been the friend and 
disciple of Walpole. He had long been connected by close ties 
with William, Duke of Cumberland. 1 By the Tories he was 
more hated than any man living. So strong was their aversion 
to him, that when, in the late reign, he had attempted to form a 
party against the Duke of Newcastle, they had thrown all their 
weight into Newcastle's scale. By the Scots, Fox was abhorred 
as the confidential friend of the conqueror of Culloden. He 
was, on personal grounds, most obnoxious to the princess mother ; 
for he had, immediately after her husband's death, advised the 
late King to take the education of her son, the heir-apparent, en- 
tirely out of her hands. He had recently given, if possible, still 
deeper offense ; for he had indulged, not without some ground, 
the ambitious hope that his beautiful sister-in-law, the Lady Sarah 
Lennox, might be Queen cf England. It had been observed 
that the King at one time rode every morning by the grounds of 
Holland House, 2 and that on such occasions Lady Sarah, dressed 
like a shepherdess at a masquerade, was making hay close to the 
road, which was then separated by no wall from the lawn. On 

1 The King's uncle, and victor at Culloden, April 16, 1746 (see pp. 71, 72). 

2 Holland House owed its" name to the first Earl of Holland, and in turn 
gave its name as a title to Henry Fox when he became the first Lord Holland. 
It had been at one time the home of Addison. The third Lord Holland, 
nephew to Charles James Fox, restored the house, and made it the meeting- 
place of statesmen, artists, and men of letters. Sydney Smith was here a 
familiar guest ; and by a confusion of names and associations Lord Holland 
is often referred to as Smith's son-in-law. Sydney Smith's daughter was 
wife to Sir Henry Holland, the distinguished physician. 



5 2 MACAULAY. 

account of the part which Fox had taken in this singular love- 
affair, he was the only member of the privy council who was 
not summoned to the meeting at which his Majesty announced 
his intended marriage with the Princess of Mecklenburg. Of all 
the statesmen of the age, therefore, it seemed that Fox was the 
last with whom Bute, the Tory, the Scot, the favorite of the prin- 
cess mother, could, under any circumstances, act. Yet to Fox, 
Bute was now compelled to apply. 

Fox had many noble and amiable qualities, which in private 
life shone forth in full luster, and made him dear to his children, 
to his dependants, and to his friends ; but as a public man he 
had no title to esteem. In him the vices which were common 
to the whole school of Walpole appeared, not perhaps in their 
worst, but certainly in their most prominent form ; for his parlia- 
mentary and official talents made all his faults conspicuous. His 
courage, his vehement temper, his contempt for appearances, led 
him to display much that others, quite as unscrupulous as him- 
self, covered with a decent veil. He was the most unpopular of 
the statesmen of his time, not because he sinned more than many 
of them, but because he canted less. 

He felt his unpopularity ; but he felt it after the fashion of 
strong minds. He became, not cautious, but reckless, and faced 
the rage of the whole nation with a scowl of inflexible defiance. 
He was born with a sweet and generous temper; but he had 
been goaded and baited into a savageness which was not natural 
to him, and which amazed and shocked those who knew him best. 
Such was the man to whom Bute, in extreme need, applied for 
succor. 

That succor Fox was not unwilling to afford. Though by no 
means of an envious temper, he had undoubtedly contemplated 
the success and popularity of Pitt with bitter mortification. He 
thought himself Pitt's match as a debater, and Pitt's superior as 
a man of business. They had long been regarded as well-paired 
rivals. They had started fair in the career of ambition. They 
had long run side by side. At length Fox had taken the lead, 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 53 

and Pitt had fallen behind. Then had come a sudden turn of 
fortune, like that in Virgil's foot-race. 1 Fox had stumbled in the 
mire, and had not only been defeated, but befouled. Pitt had 
reached the goal, and received the prize. The emoluments of 
the Pay Office might induce the defeated statesman to submit in 
silence to the ascendency of his competitor, but could not satisfy 
a mind conscious of great powers, and sore from great vexations. 
As soon, therefore, as a party arose adverse to the war and to the 
supremacy of the great war minister, the hopes of Fox began to 
revive. His feuds with the princess mother, with the Scots, with 
the Tories, he was ready to forget, if, by the help of his old ene- 
mies, he could now regain the importance which he had lost, and 
confront Pitt on equal terms. 

The alliance was therefore soon concluded. Fox was assured, 
that, if he would pilot the government out of its embarrassing 
situation, he should be rewarded with a peerage, of which he had 
long been desirous. He undertook on his side to obtain, by fair 
or foul means, a vote in favor of the peace. In consequence of 
this arrangement he became leader of the House of Commons ; 
and Grenville, stifling his vexation as well as he could, sullenly 
acquiesced in the change. 

Fox had expected that his influence would secure to the Court 
the cordial support of some eminent Whigs who were his personal 
friends, particularly of the Duke of Cumberland and of the Duke 
of Devonshire. He was disappointed, and soon found, that, in 
addition to all his other difficulties, he must reckon on the oppo- 
sition of the ablest prince of the blood, and of the great house of 
Cavendish. 2 

But he had pledged himself to win the battle ; and he was not 

1 ^ineid, Book V. Macaulay's references to the classics are always ap- 
posite enough, but often, as here, trite and academic. 

2 That is, of the two noblemen just named. This artifice, of repetition in 
another form, is one of which Macaulay is very fond, generally using it for 
purposes of rhythm and to close a period (compare Murray . . . Mansfield, 
p. 103). 



54 MACAU LAY. 

a man to go back. It was no time for squeamishness. Bute 
was made to comprehend that the ministry could be saved only 
by practicing the tactics of Walpole to an extent at which Wal- 
pole himself would have stared. The Pay Office was turned into 
a mart for votes. Hundreds of members were closeted there 
with Fox, and, as there is too much reason to believe, departed 
carrying with them the wages of infamy. It was affirmed by 
persons who had the best opportunities of obtaining information, 
that twenty-five thousand pounds were thus paid away in a single 
morning. The lowest bribe given, it was said, was a bank note 
for two hundred pounds. 

Intimidation was joined with corruption. All ranks, from the 
highest to the lowest, were to be taught that the King would be 
obeyed. The lords-lieutenants of several counties were dismissed. 
The Duke of Devonshire was especially singled out as the victim 
by whose fate the magnates of England were to take warning. 
His wealth, rank, and influence, his stainless private character, 
and the constant attachment of his family to the House of Han- 
over, did not secure him from gross personal indignity. It was 
known that he disapproved of the course which the government 
had taken ; and it was accordingly determined to humble the 
Prince of the Whigs, as he had been nicknamed by the princess 
mother. He went to the palace to pay his duty. " Tell him," 
said the King to a page, " that I will not see him." The page 
hesitated. " Go to him," said the King, "and tell him those very 
words." The message was delivered. The duke tore off his gold 
key, 1 and went away boiling with anger. His relations who were 
in office instantly resigned. A few days later the King called for 
the list of privy councilors, and with his own hand struck out the 
duke's name. 

In this step there was at least courage, though little wisdom 
or good nature. But as nothing was too high for the revenge of 
the Court, so also was nothing too low. A persecution such as 
had never been known before, and has never been known since. 

1 Badge of office of the lord-chamberlain. 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 55 

raged in every public department. Great numbers of humble 
and laborious clerks were deprived of their bread, not because 
they had neglected their duties, not because they had taken an 
active part against the ministry, but merely because they had 
owed their situations to the recommendation of some nobleman 
or gentleman who was against the peace. The proscription ex- 
tended to tidewaiters, to gaugers, to doorkeepers. One poor 
man to whom a pension had been given for his gallantry in a 
fight with smugglers was deprived of it because he had been 
befriended by the Duke of Grafton. An aged widow, who, on 
account of her husband's services in the navy, had many years 
before been made housekeeper to a public office, was dismissed 
from her situation because it was imagined that she was distantly 
connected by marriage with the Cavendish family. The public 
clamor, as may well be supposed, grew daily louder and louder ; 
but the louder it grew, the more resolutely did Fox go on with 
the work which he had begun. His old friends could not con- 
ceive what had possessed him. " I could forgive," said the Duke 
of Cumberland, " Fox's political vagaries ; but I am quite con- 
founded by his inhumanity. Surely he used to be the best- 
natured of men." 

At last Fox went so far as to take a legal opinion on the ques- 
tion whether the patents 1 granted by George II. were binding on 
George III. It is said, that, if his colleagues had not flinched, he 
would at once have turned out the tellers of the exchequer and 
justices in eyre. 2 

Meanwhile the Parliament met. The ministers, more hated by 
the people than ever, were secure of a majority ; and they had 
also reason to hope that they would have the advantage in the 
debates as well as in the divisions, for Pitt was confined to his 
chamber by a severe attack of gout. His friends moved to defer 
the consideration of the treaty till he should be able to attend, 

1 That is, all appointments important enough to require the royal sig- 
nature. 

2 Offices that required expert ability in their incumbents. 



56 MACAU LAY. 

but the motion was rejected. The great day arrived. 1 The dis- 
cussion had lasted some time, when a loud huzza was heard in 
Palace Yard. The noise came nearer and nearer, up the stairs, 
through the lobby. The door opened, and from the midst of a 
shouting multitude came forth Pitt, borne in the arms of his at- 
tendants. His face was thin and ghastly, his limbs swathed in 
flannel, his crutch in his hand. The bearers set him down within 
the bar. His friends instantly surrounded him, and with their 
help he crawled to his seat near the table. In this condition he 
spoke three hours and a half against the peace. During that 
time he was repeatedly forced to sit down and to use cordials. It 
may well be supposed that his voice was faint, that his action 
was languid, and that his speech, though occasionally brilliant 
and impressive, was feeble when compared with his best oratorical 
performances ; but those who remembered what he had done, 
and who saw what he suffered, listened to him with emotions 
stronger than any that mere eloquence can produce. He was 
unable to stay for the division, and was carried away from the 
House amidst shouts as loud as those which had announced his 
arrival. 

A large majority approved the peace. The exultation of the 
Court was boundless. " Now," exclaimed the princess mother, 
"my son is really King." The young sovereign spoke of himself 
as freed from the bondage in which his grandfather had been 
held. On one point, it was announced, his mind was unalterably 
made up : under no circumstances whatever should those Whig 
grandees who had enslaved his predecessors, and endeavored to 
enslave himself, be restored to power. 

This vaunting was premature. The real strength of the favor- 
ite was by no means proportioned to the number of votes which 
he had, on one particular division, been able to command. He 
was soon again in difficulties. The most important part of his 
budget was a tax on cider. This measure was opposed not only 

1 December, 1762. The treaty of peace was signed at Paris in the fol- 
lowing February. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 57 

by those who were generally hostile to his administration, but 
also by many of his supporters. The name of excise had always 
been hateful to the 1 ories. One of the chief crimes of Walpole, 
in their eyes, had been his partiality for this mode of raising 
money. The Tory Johnson had in his " Dictionary " given so 
scurrilous a definition of the word "excise," 1 that the commission- 
ers of excise had seriously thought of prosecuting him. The 
counties which the new impost particularly affected had always 
been Tory counties. It was the boast of John Philips, the poet 
of the English vintage, that the cider-land 2 had ever been faith- 
ful to the throne, and that all the pruning-hooks of her thousand 
orchards had been beaten into swords for the service of the ill- 
fated Stuarts. The effect of Bute's fiscal scheme was to produce 
a union between the gentry and yeomanry of the cider-land 
and the Whigs of the capital. Herefordshire and Worcestershire 
were in a flame. The city of London, though not so directly in- 
terested, was, if possible, still more excited. The debates on this 
question irreparably damaged the government. Dashwood's 
financial statement had been confused and absurd beyond belief, 
and had been received by the House with roars of laughter. He 
had sense enough to be conscious of his unfitness for the high 
situation which he held, and exclaimed in a comical fit of despair, 
" What shall I do? The boys will point at me in the street, and 
cry, ' There goes the worst chancellor of the exchequer that ever 
was.' " George Grenville came to the rescue, and spoke strongly 
on his favorite theme, — the profusion with which the late war 
had been carried on. That profusion, he said, had made taxes 
necessary. He called on the gentlemen opposite to him to say 
where they would have a tax laid, and dwelt on this topic with 
his usual prolixity. " Let them tell me where," he repeated in a 
monotonous and somewhat fretful tone. " I say, sir, let them tell 

1 Johnson's definition was " a hateful tax levied on commodities, and ad- 
judged, not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by 
those to whom excise is paid." 

2 The English counties where much cider was made. 



58 MACAULAY. 

me where. I repeat it, sir : I am entitled to say to them, ' Tell 
me where.' " Unluckily for him, Pitt had come down to the 
House that night, and had been bitterly provoked by the reflec- 
tions thrown on the war. He revenged himself by murmuring, 
in a whine resembling Grenville's, a line of a well-known song, 
" Gentle Shepherd, tell me where." " If," cried Grenville, 
" gentlemen are to be treated in this way " — Pitt, as was his 
fashion, when he meant to mark extreme contempt, rose deliber- 
ately, made his bow, and walked out of the House, leaving his 
brother-in-law in convulsions of rage, and everybody else in con- 
vulsions of laughter. It was long before Grenville lost the nick- 
name of the Gentle Shepherd. 

But the ministry had vexations still more serious to endure. 
The hatred which the Tories and Scots bore to Fox was impla- 
cable. In a moment of extreme peril they had consented to put 
themselves under his guidance ; but the aversion with which they 
regarded him broke forth as -soon as the crisis seemed to be over. 
Some of them attacked him about the accounts of the Pay Office. 
Some of them rudely interrupted him, when speaking, by laughter 
and ironical cheers. He was naturally desirous to escape from 
so disagreeable a situation, and demanded the peerage which had 
been promised as the reward of his services. 

It was clear that there must be some change in the composition 
of the ministry ; but scarcely any, even of those who from their 
situation might be supposed to be in all the secrets of the govern- 
ment, anticipated what really took place. To the amazement of 
the Parliament and the nation, it was suddenly announced that 
Bute had resigned. 

Twenty different explanations of this strange step were sug- 
gested. Some attributed it to profound design, and some to 
sudden panic. Some said that the lampoons of the opposition 
had driven the earl from the field ; some, that he had taken office 
only in order to bring the war to a close, and had always meant 
to retire when that object had been accomplished. He publicly 
assigned ill health as his reason for quitting business, and privately 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 59 

complained that he was not cordially seconded by his colleagues, 
and that Lord Mansfield in particular, whom he had himself 
brought into the cabinet, gave him no support in the House of 
Peers. Mansfield was, indeed, far too sagacious not to perceive 
that Bute's situation was one of great peril, and far too timorous 
to thrust himself into peril for the sake of another. The prob- 
ability, however, is, that Bute's conduct on this occasion, like the 
conduct of most men on most occasions, was determined by 
mixed motives. We suspect that he was sick of office ; for this 
is a feeling much more common among ministers than persons 
who see public life from a distance are disposed to believe ; and 
nothing could be more natural than that this feeling should take 
possession of the mind of Bute. In general, a statesman climbs 
by slow degrees. Many laborious years elapse before he reaches 
the topmost pinnacle of preferment. In the earlier part of his 
career, therefore, he is constantly lured on by seeing something 
above him. During his ascent he gradually becomes inured to 
the annoyances which belong to a life of ambition. By the time 
that he has attained the highest point, he has become patient of 
labor and callous to abuse. He is kept constant to his vocation, 
in spite of all its discomforts, at first by hope, and at last by 
habit. It was not so with Bute. His whole public life lasted 
little more than two years. On the day on which he became a 
politician he became a cabinet minister. In a few months he 
was, both in name and in show, chief of the administration. 
Greater than he had been he could not be. If what he already 
possessed was vanity and vexation of spirit, no delusion remained 
to entice him onward. He had been cloyed with the pleasures 
of ambition before he had been seasoned to its pains. His habits 
had not been such as were likely to fortify his mind against oblo- 
quy and public hatred. He had reached his forty-eighth year in 
dignified ease, without knowing, by personal experience, what it 
was to be ridiculed and slandered. All at once, without any pre- 
vious initiation, he had found himself exposed to such a storm of 
invective and satire as had never burst on the head of any states- 



60 MACAU LAY. 

man. The emoluments of office were now nothing to him, for 
he had just succeeded to a princely property by the death of his 
father-in-law. 1 All the honors which could be bestowed on him 
he had already secured. He had obtained the Garter 2 for him- 
self, and a British peerage for his son. 3 He seems also to have 
imagined that by quitting the treasury he should escape from 
danger and abuse without really resigning power, and should still 
be able to exercise in private supreme influence over the royal 
mind. 

Whatever may have been his motives, he retired. Fox at the 
same time took refuge in the House of Lords ; and George Gren- 
ville became first lord of the treasury, and chancellor of the ex- 
chequer. 

We believe that those who made this arrangement fully intended 
that Grenville should be a mere puppet in the hands of Bute, for 
Grenville was as yet very imperfectly known even to those who 
had observed him long. He passed for a mere official drudge ; 
and he had all the industry, the minute accuracy, the formality, 
the tediousness, which belong to the character. But he had other 
qualities which had not yet shown themselves, — devouring am- 
bition, dauntless courage, self-confidence amounting to presump- 
tion, and a temper which could not endure opposition. He was 
not disposed to be anybody's tool ; and he had no attachment, 
political or personal, to Bute. The two men had, indeed, noth- 
ing in common, except a strong propensity towards harsh and 
unpopular courses. Their principles were fundamentally differ- 
ent. Bute was a Tory. Grenville would have been very angry 
with any person who should have denied his claim to be a Whig. 
He was more prone to tyrannical measures than Bute, but he 
loved tyranny only when disguised under the forms of constitu- 

1 Bute married the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The 
" princely property " consisted of the Wortley estates. 

2 The Order of the Garter, established by Edward III., is the highest order 
of knighthood in Great Britain. 

3 Lord Mountstuart, first Marquis of Bute. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 61 

tional liberty. He mixed up, after a fashion then not very un- 
usual, the theories of the republicans of the seventeenth century 
with the technical maxims of English law, and thus succeeded in 
combining anarchical speculation with arbitrary practice. The 
voice of the people was the voice of God, but the only legitimate 
organ through which the voice of the people could be uttered 
was the Parliament. All power was from the people, but to the 
Parliament the whole power of the people had been delegated. 
No Oxonian divine had ever, even in the years which immedi- 
ately followed the Restoration, 1 demanded for the King so abject, 
so unreasoning, a homage, as Grenville, on what he considered 
as the purest Whig principles, demanded for the Parliament. As 
he wished to see the Parliament despotic over the nation, so he 
wished to see it also despotic over the Court. In his view, the 
prime-minister, possessed of the confidence of the House of Com- 
mons, ought to be mayor of the palace. The King was a mere 
Childeric or Chilperic, 2 who might well think himself lucky in be- 
ing permitted to enjoy such handsome apartments at St. James's, 
and so fine a park at Windsor. 

Thus the opinions of Bute and those of Grenville were dia- 
metrically opposed. Nor was there any private friendship be- 
tween the two statesmen. Grenville's nature was not forgiving ; 
and he well remembered how, a few months before, he had been 
compelled to yield the lead of the House of Commons to Fox. 

We are inclined to think, on the whole, that the worst admin- 
istration which has governed England since the Revolution was 
that of George Grenville. His public acts may be classed under 
two heads, — outrages on the liberty of the people, and outrages 
on the dignity of the Crown. 

He began by making war on the press. John Wilkes, member 
of Parliament for Aylesbury, was singled out for persecution. 

1 That is, of the Stuarts, in 1660, after the period of the Commonwealth. 

2 These were Prankish kings of the fifth and sixth centuries, who were 
mere puppets of the great land-owners. The real chief of state, appointed 
at the dictation of the latter, was called " mayor of the palace." 



62 MACAULAY. 

Wilkes had till very lately been known chiefly as one of the most 
profane, licentious, and agreeable rakes about town. He was a 
man of taste, reading, and engaging manners. His sprightly 
conversation was the delight of greenrooms and taverns, and 
pleased even grave hearers when he was sufficiently under re- 
straint to abstain from detailing the particulars of his amours, and 
from breaking jests on the New Testament. His expensive de- 
baucheries forced him to have recourse to the Jews. He was 
soon a ruined man, and determined to try his chance as a politi- 
cal adventurer. In Parliament he did not succeed. His speak- 
ing, though pert, was feeble, and by no means interested his 
hearers so much as to make them forget his face, which was so 
hideous that the caricaturists were forced, in their own despite, 
to flatter him. As a writer, he made a better figure. He set up 
a weekly paper called the " North Briton." This journal, written 
with some pleasantry, and great audacity and impudence, had a 
considerable number of readers. Forty-four numbers had been 
published when Bute resigned ; and, though almost every number 
had contained matter grossly libelous, no prosecution had been 
instituted. The forty-fifth number was innocent when compared 
with the majority of those which had preceded it, and indeed 
contained nothing so strong as may in our time be found daily 
in the leading articles of the " Times " and " Morning Chronicle." 
But Grenville was now at the head of affairs. A new spirit had 
been infused into the administration. Authority was to be up- 
held. The government was no longer to be braved with im- 
punity. Wilkes was arrested under a general warrant, 1 conveyed 
to the Tower, and confined there with circumstances of unusual 
severity. His papers were seized, and carried to the secretary of 
state. These harsh and illegal measures produced a violent out- 
break of popular rage, which was soon changed to delight and 
exultation. The arrest was pronounced unlawful by the Court 

1 Under the form of " writs of assistance," these warrants had much to 
do with bringing about the Revolution of 1776. The Fourth Amendment to 
our Constitution was framed against this kind of writ (see p. 86). 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 63 

of Common Pleas, in which Chief Justice Pratt 1 presided, and 
the prisoner was discharged. This victory over the government 
was celebrated with enthusiasm both in London and in the cider 
counties. 

While the ministers were daily becoming more odious to the 
nation, they were doing their best to make themselves also odious 
to the Court. They gave the King plainly to understand that they 
were determined not to be Lord Bute's creatures, and exacted a 
promise that no secret adviser should have access to the royal 
ear. They soon found reason to suspect that this promise had 
not been observed. They remonstrated in terms less respectful 
than their master had been accustomed to hear, and gave him a 
fortnight to make his choice between his favorite and his cabinet. 

George III. was greatly disturbed. He had but a few weeks 
before exulted in his deliverance from the yoke of the great Whig 
connection. He had even declared that his honor would not 
permit him ever again to admit the members of that connection 
into his service. He now found that he had only exchanged one 
set of masters for another set still harsher and more imperious. 
In his distress he thought on Pitt. From Pitt it was possible 
that better terms might be obtained than either from Grenville or 
from the party of which Newcastle was the head. 

Grenville, on his return from an excursion into the country, 
repaired to Buckingham House. 2 He was astonished to find at 
the entrance a chair, the shape of which was well known to him, 
and indeed to all London. It was distinguished by a large boot, 
made for the purpose of accommodating the Great Commoner's 
gouty leg. Grenville guessed the whole. His brother-in-law was 
closeted with the King. Bute, provoked by what he considered 

1 This man is better known as Lord Camden. He was a friend of Frank- 
lin, and concerned with him in the treaty of peace, 1783. 

2 The royal residence. The present Buckingham Palace stands upon its 
site. As Thackeray expressed it, " George III. and his queen lived in a 
very unpretending but elegant-looking house, on the site of the hideous pile 
under which his grand-daughter at present reposes." 



64 MACAULAY. 

as the unfriendly and ungrateful conduct of his successors, had 
himself proposed that Pitt should be summoned to the palace. 

Pitt had two audiences on two successive days. What passed 
at the first interview led him to expect that the negotiation would 
be brought to a satisfactory close, but on the morrow he found 
the King less complying. The best account, indeed the only 
trustworthy account, of the conference, is that which was taken 
from Pitt's own mouth by Lord Hardwicke. It appears that Pitt 
strongly represented the importance of conciliating those chiefs 
of the Whig party who had been so unhappy as to incur the royal 
displeasure. They had, he said, been the most constant friends 
of the Plouse of Hanover. Their power was great; they had 
been long versed in public business. If they were to be under 
sentence of exclusion, a solid administration could not be formed. 
His Majesty could not bear to think of putting himself into the 
hands of those whom he had recently chased from his court with 
the strongest marks of anger. " I am sorry, Mr. Pitt," he said, 
" but I see this will not do. My honor is concerned. I must 
support my honor." How his Majesty succeeded in supporting 
his honor, we shall soon see. 

Pitt retired, and the King was reduced to request the ministers, 
whom he had been on the point of discarding, to remain in office. 
During the two years which followed, Grenville, now closely 
leagued with the Bedfords, was the master of the Court ; and a 
hard master he proved. He knew that he was kept in place only 
because there was no choice except between himself and the 
Whigs. That under any circumstances the Whigs would be for- 
given, he thought impossible. The late attempt to get rid of 
him had roused his resentment : the failure of that attempt had 
liberated him from all fear. He had never been very courtly. 
He now began to hold a language, to which, since the days of 
Cornet Joyce and President Bradshaw, 1 no English king had 
been compelled to listen. 

1 Bradshaw presided at the trial of Charles I. Joyce was leader of the 
agitators who carried off Charles from the parliamentary commission in 1647. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 65 

In one matter, indeed, Grenville, at the expense of justice and 
liberty, gratified the passions of the Court while gratifying his 
own. The persecution of Wilkes was eagerly pressed. He had 
written a parody on Pope's " Essay on Man," entitled the " Essay 
on Woman," and had appended to it notes, in ridicule of War- 
burton's famous "Commentary." 1 This composition was ex- 
ceedingly profligate, but not more so, we think, than some of 
Pope's own works, the imitation of the second satire of the first 
book of Horace, for example ; and, to do Wilkes justice, he had 
not, like Pope, given his ribaldry to the world. He had merely 
printed at a private press a very small number of copies, which 
he meant to present to some of his boon companions, whose 
morals were in no more danger of being corrupted by a loose 
book than a negro of being tanned by a warm sun. A tool of 
the government, by giving a bribe to the printer, procured a copy 
of this trash, and placed it in the hands of the ministers. The 
ministers resolved to visit Wilkes's offense against decorum with 
the utmost rigor of the law. W T hat share piety and respect for 
morals had in dictating this resolution, our readers may judge 
from the fact that no person was more eager for bringing the 
libertine poet to punishment than Lord March, afterwards Duke 
of Queensberry. On the first day of the session of Parliament, 
the book, thus disgracefully obtained, was laid on the table of 
the Lords by the Earl of Sandwich, whom the Duke of Bedford's 
interest had made secretary of state. The unfortunate author 
had not the slightest suspicion that his licentious poem had ever 
been seen, except by his printer and by a few of his dissipated 
companions, till it was produced in full Parliament. Though he 
was a man of easy temper, averse from danger, and not very sus- 
ceptible of shame, the surprise, the disgrace, the prospect of utter 
ruin, put him beside himself. He picked a quarrel with one of 
Lord Bute's dependants, fought a duel, was seriously wounded, 
and, when half recovered, fled to France. His enemies had now 

1 Warburton, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, wrote an approving com- 
mentary on Pope's Essay. 

5 



66 MACAULAY. 

their own way, both in the Parliament and in the King's Bench. 
He was censured, expelled from the House of Commons, out- 
lawed. His works were ordered to be burned by the common 
hangman. Yet was the multitude still true to him. In the 
minds even of many moral and religious men, his crime seemed 
light when compared with the crime of his accusers. The con- 
duct of Sandwich, in particular, excited universal disgust. His 
own vices were notorious ; and, only a fortnight before he laid 
the " Essay on Woman " before the House of Lords, he had been 
drinking and singing loose catches with Wilkes at one of the most 
dissolute clubs in London. Shortly after the meeting of Parlia- 
ment, the " Beggar's Opera " was acted at Covent Garden Thea- 
ter. When Macheath uttered the words, " That Jemmy Twitcher 
should peach me I own surprised me," pit, boxes, and galleries 
burst into a roar which seemed likely to bring the roof down. 
From that day Sandwich was universally known by the nickname 
of "Jemmy Twitcher." The ceremony of burning the "North 
Briton " was interrupted by a riot. The constables were beaten ; 
the paper was rescued ; and, instead of it, a jack-boot and a pet- 
ticoat were committed to the flames. Wilkes had instituted an 
action for the seizure of his papers against the undersecretary of 
state. The jury gave a thousand pounds damages. But neither 
these nor any other indications of public feeling had power to 
move Grenville. He had the Parliament with him ; and, accord- 
ing to his political creed, the sense of the nation was to be col- 
lected from the Parliament alone. 

Soon, however, he found reason to fear that even the Parlia- 
ment might fail him. On the question of the legality of general 
warrants, the opposition, having on its side all sound principles, 
all constitutional authorities, and the voice of the whole nation, 
mustered in great force, and was joined by many who did not 
ordinarily vote against the government. On one occasion the 
ministry, in a very full House, had a majority of only fourteen 
votes. The storm, however, blew over. The spirit of the op- 
position, from whatever cause, began to flag at the moment when 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 67 

success seemed almost certain. The session ended without any 
change. Pitt, whose eloquence had shone with its usual luster 
in all the principal debates, and whose popularity was greater 
than ever, was still a private man. Grenville, detested alike by 
the Court and by the people, was still minister. 

As soon as the Houses had risen, Grenville took a step which 
proved, even more signally than any of his past acts, how des- 
potic, how acrimonious, and how fearless his nature was. Among 
the gentlemen not ordinarily opposed to the government, who, 
on the great constitutional question of general warrants, had voted 
with the minority, was Henry Conway, brother of the Earl of 
Hertford, — a brave soldier, a tolerable speaker, and a well-mean- 
ing though not a wise or vigorous politician. He was now de- 
prived of his regiment, the merited reward of faithful and gallant 
service in two wars. It was confidently asserted that in this 
violent measure the King heartily concurred. 

But whatever pleasure the persecution of Wilkes, or the dis- 
missal of Conway, may have given to the royal mind, it is certain 
that his Majesty's aversion to his ministers increased day by day. 
Grenville was as frugal of the public money as of his own, and 
morosely refused to accede to the King's request that a few thou- 
sand pounds might be expended in buying some open fields to 
the west of the gardens of Buckingham House. In consequence 
of this refusal, the fields were soon covered with buildings, and 
the King and Queen were overlooked in their most private walks 
by the upper windows of a hundred houses. Nor was this the 
worst. Grenville was as liberal of words as he was sparing of 
guineas. Instead of explaining himself in that clear, concise, 
and lively manner which alone could win the attention of a young 
mind new to business, he spoke in the closet just as he spoke in 
the House of Commons. When he had harangued two hours, he 
looked at his watch, as he had been in the habit of looking at the 
clock opposite the speaker's chair, apologized for the length of 
his discourse, and then went on for an hour more. The mem- 
bers of the House of Commons can cough an orator down, or 



68 MACAU LAY. 

can walk away to dinner ; and they were by no means sparing in 
the use of these privileges when Grenville was on his legs. But 
the poor young King had to endure all this eloquence with mourn- 
ful civility. To the end of his life he continued to talk with 
horror of Grenville's orations. 

About this time took place one of the most singular events in 
Pitt's life. There was a certain Sir William Pynsent, a Somer- 
setshire baronet of Whig politics, who had been a member of the 
House of Commons in the days of Queen Anne, and had retired 
to rural privacy when the Tory party, towards the end of her 
reign, obtained the ascendency in her councils. His manners 
were eccentric. His morals lay under very odious imputations. 
But his fidelity to his political opinions was unalterable. Dur- 
ing fifty years of seclusion he continued to brood over the cir- 
cumstances which had driven him from public life, the dismissal 
of the Whigs, the peace of Utrecht, the desertion of our allies. 1 
He now thought that he perceived a close analogy between the 
well-remembered events of his youth and the events which he 
had witnessed in extreme old age ; between the disgrace of Marl- 
borough and the disgrace of Pitt ; between the elevation of Har- 
ley and the elevation of Bute ; between the treaty negotiated by 
St. John and the treaty negotiated by Bedford ; between the 
wrongs of the House of Austria in 1712 and the wrongs of the 
House of Brandenburg in 1 762.2 This fancy took such posses- 
sion of the old man's mind that he determined to leave his whole 
property to Pitt. In this way Pitt unexpectedly came into pos- 
session of near three thousand pounds a year. Nor could all the 
malice of his enemies find any ground for reproach in the trans- 

1 This peace was made by the Tory ministry of 1 713. Although by its 
terms Spain ceded Gibraltar, and France ceded Nova Scotia and Newfound- 
land, to the English, these advantages were secured at the price of the aban- 
donment of England's allies, the Germans and Dutch. 

2 Marlborough had no fixed political principles, and Harley had been 
much more than a favorite. These analogies were merely specious ; but, as 
to the bad faith of the two treaties, there was real resemblance. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 69 

action. Nobody could call him a legacy-hunter. Nobody 
could accuse him of seizing that to which others had a better 
claim ; for he had never in his life seen Sir William, and Sir 
William had left no relation so near as to be entitled to form any 
expectations respecting the estate. 

The fortunes of Pitt seemed to flourish, but his health was 
worse than ever. We cannot find that during the session which 
began in January, 1765, he once appeared in Parliament. He 
remained some months in profound retirement at Hayes, his 
favorite villa, scarcely moving except from his arm-chair to his 
bed, and from his bed to his arm-chair, and often employing his 
wife as his amanuensis in his most confidential correspondence. 
Some of his detractors whispered that his invisibility was to be 
ascribed quite as much to affectation as to gout. In truth, his 
character, high and splendid as it was, wanted simplicity. With 
genius which did not need the aid of stage tricks, and with a 
spirit which should have been far above them, he had yet been 
through life in the habit of practicing them. It was therefore 
now surmised, that, having acquired all the consideration which 
could be derived from eloquence and from great services to the 
state, he had determined not to make himself cheap by often ap- 
pearing in public, but, under the pretext of ill health, to surround 
himself with mystery, to emerge only at long intervals and on 
momentous occasions, and at other times to deliver his oracles 
only to a few favored votaries, who were suffered to make pil- 
grimages to his shrine. If such were his object, it was for a time 
fully attained. Never was the magic of his name so powerful, 
never was he regarded by his country with such superstitious 
veneration, as during this year of silence and seclusion. 

While Pitt was thus absent from Parliament, Grenville pro- 
posed a measure destined to produce a great revolution, the 
effects of which will long be felt by the whole human race. We 
speak of the act for imposing stamp duties on the North Ameri- 
can Colonies. The plan was eminently characteristic of its 
author. Every feature of the parent was found in the child. A 



7° MACAU LAY. 

timid statesman would have shrunk from a step of which Wal- 
pole, at a time when the Colonies were far less powerful, had 
said, " He who shall propose it will be a much bolder man than 
I." But the nature of Grenville was insensible to fear. A states- 
man of large views would have felt that to lay taxes at West- 
minster on New England and New York was a course opposed, 
not indeed to the letter of the statute book, or to any decision 
contained in the term reports, but to the principles of good gov- 
ernment, and to the spirit of the Constitution. 1 A statesman of 
large views would also have felt that ten times the estimated prod- 
uce of the American stamps would have been dearly purchased 
by even a transient quarrel between the mother country and the 
Colonies. But Grenville knew of no spirit of the Constitution 
distinct from the letter of the law, and of no national interests 
except those which are expressed by pounds, shillings, and 
pence. That his policy might give birth to deep discontents in 
all the provinces, from the shore of the Great Lakes to the Mexi- 
can Sea ; that France and Spain might seize the opportunity of 
revenge ; that the empire might be dismembered ; that the debt 
(that debt with the amount of which he perpetually reproached 
Pitt) might, in consequence of his own policy, be doubled, — 
these were possibilities which never occurred to that small, sharp 
mind. 

The Stamp Act will be remembered as long as the globe lasts ; 
but at the time it attracted much less notice in this country than 
another act 2 which is now almost utterly forgotten. The King 
fell ill, and was thought to be in a dangerous state. His com- 
plaint, we believe, was the same which at a later period repeat- 
edly incapacitated him for the performance of his regal func- 
tions. 3 The heir-apparent was only two years old. It was 

1 This phrase, " the spirit of the Constitution," was just at this time 
coming into use among those who opposed the royal prerogative. 

2 Known as the Regency Act of 1765. 

3 The King had fits of lunacy for many years, and ceased to reign in 
November, 1810. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 7 1 

clearly proper to make provision for the administration of the 
government in case of a minority. The discussions on this point 
brought the quarrel between the Court and the ministry to a crisis. 
The King wished to be intrusted with the power of naming a re- 
gent by will. The ministers feared, or affected to fear, that, if 
this power were conceded to him, he would name the princess 
mother, nay, possibly the Earl of Bute. They therefore insisted 
on introducing into the bill words confining the King's choice to 
the royal family. Having thus excluded Bute, they urged the 
King to let them, in the most marked manner, exclude the prin- 
cess dowager also. They assured him that the House of Com- 
mons would undoubtedly strike her name out, and by this threat 
they wrung from him a reluctant assent. In a few days it ap- 
peared that the representations by which they had induced the 
King to put this gross and public affront on his mother were un- 
founded. The friends of the princess in the House of Commons 
moved that her name should be inserted. The ministers could 
not decently attack the parent of their master. They hoped that 
the opposition would come to their help, and put on them a force 
to which they would gladly have yielded. But the majority of 
the opposition, though hating the princess, hated Grenville more, 
beheld his embarrassment with delight, and would do nothing to 
extricate him from it. The princess's name was accordingly 
placed in the list of persons qualified to hold the regency. 

The King's resentment was now at the height. The present 
evil seemed to him more intolerable than any other. Even the 
junta of Whig grandees 1 could not treat him worse than he had 
been treated by his present ministers. In his distress he poured 
out his whole heart to his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland. The 
duke was not a man to be loved, but he was eminently a man to 
be trusted. He had an intrepid temper, a strong understanding, 
and a high sense of honor and duty. As a general, he belonged 
to a remarkable class of captains, — captains, we mean, whose 

1 The men, that is, who had been turned out of office and snubbed at 
court when Bute came in. 



72 MACAULAY. 

fate it has been to lose almost all the battles which they have 
fought, and yet to be reputed stout and skillful soldiers. Such 
captains were Coligni and William III. AVe might, perhaps, add 
Marshal Soult to the list. The bravery of the Duke of Cumber- 
land was such as distinguished him even among the princes of 
his brave house. The indifference with which he rode about 
amidst musket-balls and cannon-balls was not the highest proof 
of his fortitude. Hopeless maladies, horrible surgical operations, 
far from unmanning him, did not even discompose him. With 
courage, he had the virtues which are akin to courage. He 
spoke the truth, was open in enmity and friendship, and upright 
in all his dealings ; but his nature was hard, and what seemed to 
him justice was rarely tempered with mercy. He was therefore, 
during many years, one of the most unpopular men in England. 
The severity with which he had treated the rebels after the battle 
of Culloden had gained for him the name of " the Butcher." His 
attempts to introduce into the army of England, then in a most 
disorderly state, the rigorous discipline of Potsdam, 1 had excited 
still stronger disgust. Nothing was too bad to be believed of 
him. Many honest people were so absurd as to fancy, that, if 
he were left regent during the minority of his nephews, there 
would be another smothering in the Tower. 2 These feelings, 
however, had passed away. The duke had been living during 
some years in retirement. The English, full of animosity against 
the Scots, now blamed his royal Highness only for having left so 
many Camerons and Macphersons to be made gaugers and cus- 
tomhouse officers. He was therefore at present a favorite with 
his countrymen, and especially with the inhabitants of London. 

1 That is, the discipline of Frederick the Great, whose favorite residence 
was at Potsdam. 

2 An allusion to the nephews of Richard III., supposed to have been 
smothered in the Tower at the instigation of that king. On one occasion, 
when George III. was a mere lad, his soldier uncle, to amuse the youngster, 
drew out his saber and showed it to him. The boy started back and turned 
pale. " What," mumbled the duke, " must they have told him about me?" 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 73 

He had little reason to love the King, and had shown clearly, 
though not obtrusively, his dislike of the system which had lately 
been pursued ; but he had high and almost romantic notions of 
the duty which, as a prince of the blood, he owed to the head of 
his house. He determined to extricate his nephew from bond- 
age, and to effect a reconciliation between the Whig party and 
the throne, on terms honorable to both. 

In this mind he set off for Hayes, and was admitted to Pitt's 
sick-room ; for Pitt would not leave his chamber, and would not 
communicate with any messenger of inferior dignity. And now 
began a long series of errors on the part of the illustrious states- 
man, — errors which involved his country in difficulties and dis- 
tresses more serious even than those from which his genius had 
formerly rescued her. His language was haughty, unreasonable, 
almost unintelligible. The only thing which could be discerned 
through a cloud of vague and not very gracious phrases was that 
he would not at that moment take office. The truth, we believe, 
was this. Lord Temple, who was Pitt's evil genius, had just 
formed a new scheme of politics. Hatred of Bute and of the 
princess had, it should seem, taken entire possession of Temple's 
soul. He had quarreled with his brother George, because George 
had been connected with Bute and the princess. Now that 
George appeared to be the enemy of Bute and of the princess, 
Temple was eager to bring about a general family reconciliation. 
The three brothers — as Temple, Grenville, and Pitt were popu- 
larly called — might make a ministry without leaning for aid either 
on Bute or on the Whig connection. With such views, Temple 
used all his influence to dissuade Pitt from acceding to the prop- 
ositions of the Duke of Cumberland. Pitt was not convinced. 
But Temple had an influence over him such as no other person 
had ever possessed. They were very old friends, very near rela- 
tions. If Pitt's talents and fame had been useful to Temple, 
Temple's purse had formerly, in times of great need, been useful 
to Pitt. They had never been parted in politics. Twice they 
had come into the cabinet together : twice they had left it to- 



74 MACAU LAY. 

gether. Pitt could not bear to think of taking office without his 
chief ally. Yet he felt that he was doing wrong, that he was 
throwing away a great opportunity of serving his country. The 
obscure and unconciliatory style of the answers which he returned 
to the overtures of the Duke of Cumberland may be ascribed to 
the embarrassment and vexation of a mind not at peace with 
itself. It is said that he mournfully exclaimed to Temple, — 
" Extinxti te meque, soror, populumque, patresque 
Sidonios, urbemque tuam." 1 

The prediction was but too just. 

Finding Pitt impracticable, the Duke of Cumberland advised 
the King to submit to necessity, and to keep Grenville and the 
Bedfords. It was indeed not a time at which offices could safely 
be left vacant. The unsettled state of the government had pro- 
duced a general relaxation through all the departments of the 
public service. Meetings which at another time would have been 
harmless now turned to riots, and rapidly rose almost to the dig- 
nity of rebellions. The Houses of Parliament were blockaded 
by the Spitalfields 2 weavers. Bedford House was assailed on 
all sides by a furious rabble, and was strongly garrisoned with 
horse and foot. Some people attributed these disturbances to 
the friends of Bute, and some to the friends of Wilkes ; but, 
whatever might be the cause, the effect was general insecurity. 
Under such circumstances, the King had no choice. With bitter 
feelings of mortification, he informed the ministers that he meant 
to retain them. 

They answered by demanding from him a promise on his royal 
word never more to consult Lord Bute. The promise was given. 
They then demanded something more. Lord Bute's brother, 
Mr. Mackenzie, held a lucrative office in Scotland. Mr. Mac- 
kenzie must be dismissed. The King replied that the office had 

1 yEneid, iv. 682. "Ah, sister! you have destroyed yourself and me, your 
people, your Tyrian nobles, and your city." 

2 A region in the northeast quarter of London ; seat of extensive silk 
manufacture. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 75 

been given under very peculiar circumstances, and that he had 
promised never to take it away while he lived. Grenville was 
obstinate ; and the King, with a very bad grace, yielded. 

The session of Parliament was over. The triumph of the min- 
isters was complete. The King was almost as much a prisoner as 
Charles I. had been when in the Isle of Wight. Such were the 
fruits of the policy which, only a few months before, was repre- 
sented as having forever secured the throne against the dictation 
of insolent subjects. 

His Majesty's natural resentment showed itself in every look 
and word. In his extremity he looked wistfully towards that 
Whig connection, once the object of his dread and hatred. The 
Duke of Devonshire, who had been treated with such unjustifi- 
able harshness, had lately died, and had been succeeded by his 
son, who was still a boy. The King condescended to express his 
regret for what had passed, and to invite the young duke to 
court. The noble youth came, attended by his uncles, and was 
received with marked graciousness. 

This and many other symptoms of the same kind irritated the 
ministers. They had still in store for their sovereign an insult 
which would have provoked his grandfather to kick them out 
of the room. Grenville and Bedford demanded an audience of 
him, and read him a remonstrance of many pages, which they 
had drawn up with great care. His Majesty was accused of 
breaking his word, and of treating his advisers with gross unfair- 
ness. The princess was mentioned in language by no means 
eulogistic. Hints were thrown out that Bute's head was in 
danger. The King was plainly told that he must not continue 
to show, as he had done, that he disliked the situation in which 
he was placed ; that he must frown upon the opposition ; that 
he must carry it fair towards his ministers in public. He several 
times interrupted the reading by declaring that he had ceased 
to hold any communication with Bute. But the ministers, disre- 
garding his denial, went on ; and the King listened in silence, 
almost choked by rage. When they ceased to read, he merely 



76 MACAU LAY. 

made a gesture expressive of his wish to be left alone. He after- 
wards owned that he thought he should have gone into a tit. 

Driven to despair, he again had recourse to the Duke of Cum- 
berland ; and the Duke of Cumberland again had recourse to 
Pitt. Pitt was really desirous to undertake the direction of 
affairs, and owned, with many dutiful expressions, that the terms 
offered by the King were all that any subject could desire. But 
Temple was impracticable ; and Pitt, with great regret, declared 
that he could not, without the concurrence of his brother-in-law, 
undertake the administration. 

The duke now saw only one way of delivering his nephew. 
An administration must be formed of the Whigs in opposition, 
without Pitt's help. The difficulties seemed almost insuperable. 
Death and desertion had grievously thinned the ranks of the 
party lately supreme in the state. Those among whom the 
duke's choice lay might be divided into two classes, — men too 
old for important offices, and men who had never been in any 
important office before. The cabinet must be composed of 
broken invalids or of raw recruits. 

This was an evil, yet not an unmixed evil. If the new Whig 
statesmen had little experience in business and debate, they were, 
on the other hand, pure from the taint of that political immoral- 
ity which had deeply infected their predecessors. Long prosper- 
ity had corrupted that great party which had expelled the Stuarts, 
limited the prerogatives of the Crown, and curbed the intolerance 
of the Hierarchy. Adversity had already produced a salutary 
effect. On the day of the accession of George III., the ascend- 
ency of the Whig party terminated, and on that day the purifica- 
tion of the Whig party began. The rising chiefs of that party 
were men of a very different sort from Sandys and Winnington, 
from Sir William Yonge and Henry Fox. They were men 
worthy to have charged by the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, 
or to have exchanged the last embrace with Russell l on the 
scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. They carried into politics the 
1 Lord William Russell, executed in 1683 for alleged treason. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 77 

same high principles of virtue which regulated their private deal- 
ings, nor would they stoop to promote even the noblest and most 
salutary ends by means which honor and probity condemn. 
Such men were Lord John Cavendish, Sir George Savile, and 
others whom we hold in honor as the second founders of the 
Whig party, as the restorers of its pristine health and energy after 
half a century of degeneracy. 

The chief of this respectable band was the Marquis of Rock- 
ingham, a man of splendid fortune, excellent sense, and stainless 
character. He was indeed nervous to such a degree, that, to the 
very close of his life, he never rose without great reluctance and 
embarrassment to address the House of Lords. But, though not 
a great orator, he had in a high degree some of the qualities of a 
statesman. He chose his friends well, and he had in an extraor- 
dinary degree the art of attaching them to him by ties of the 
most honorable kind. The cheerful fidelity with which they ad- 
hered to him through many years of almost hopeless opposition 
was less admirable than the disinterestedness and delicacy which 
they showed when he rose to power. 

We are inclined to think that the use and the abuse of party 
cannot be better illustrated than by a parallel between two power- 
ful connections of that time, — the Rockinghams and the Bed- 
fords. The Rockingham party was, in our view, exactly what a 
party should be. It consisted of men bound together by com- 
mon opinions, by common public objects, by mutual esteem. 
That they desired to obtain, by honest and constitutional means, 
the direction of affairs, they openly avowed ; but, though often 
invited to accept the honors and emoluments of office, they 
steadily refused to do so on any conditions inconsistent with their 
principles. The Bedford party, as a party, had, as far as we can 
discover, no principle 'whatever. Rigby and Sandwich wanted 
public money, and thought that they should fetch a higher price 
jointly than singly. They therefore acted in concert, and pre- 
vailed on a much more important and a much better man than 
themselves to act with them. 



78 MACAU LAY. 

It was to Rockingham that the Duke of Cumberland now had 
recourse. The marquis consented to take the treasury. New- 
castle, so long the recognized chief of the Whigs, could not well 
be excluded from the ministry. He was appointed keeper of the 
privy seal. A very honest, clear-headed country gentleman, of 
the name of Dowdeswell, became chancellor of the exchequer. 
Gen. Conway, who had served under the Duke of Cumberland, 
and was strongly attached to his royal Highness, was made secre- 
tary of state, with the lead in the House of Commons. A great 
Whig nobleman in the prime of manhood, from whom much was 
at that time expected, — Augustus, Duke of Grafton, — was the 
other secretary. 

The oldest man living could remember no government so weak 
in oratorical talents and in official experience. The general 
opinion was, that the ministers might hold office during the re- 
cess, but that the first day of debate in Parliament would be the 
last day of their power. Charles Townshend was asked what 
he thought of the new administration. "It is," said he, "mere 
lutestring, pretty summer wear. It will never do for the winter." 

At this conjuncture Lord Rockingham had the wisdom to dis- 
cern the value, and secure the aid, of an ally, who, to eloquence 
surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, 1 and to industry which shamed 
the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension 
to which neither Pitt nor Grenville could lay claim. A young 
Irishman had some time before come over to push his fortune in 
London. He had written much for the booksellers ; but he was 
best known by a little treatise, 2 in which the style and reason- 
ing of Bolingbroke were mimicked with exquisite skill, and by a 
theory, 3 of more ingenuity than soundness, touching the pleasures 
which we receive from the objects of taste. He had also attained 

1 There is abundant evidence that Burke's delivery was defective, and his 
presence uncommanding. Literary admiration for Burke had perhaps some 
influence upon Macaulay's estimate of the statesman. 

2 A Vindication of Natural Society. 

3 Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 79 

a high reputation as a talker, and was regarded by the men of 
letters who supped together at the Turk's Head 1 as the only 
match in conversation for Dr. Johnson. He now became private 
secretary to Lord Rockingham, and was brought into Parliament 
by his patron's influence. These arrangements, indeed, were not 
made without some difficulty. The Duke of Newcastle, who 
was always meddling and chattering, adjured the first lord of the 
treasury to be on his guard against this adventurer, whose real 
name was O'Bourke, and whom his grace knew to be a wild 
Irishman, a Jacobite, a Papist, a concealed Jesuit. Lord Rock- 
ingham treated the calumny as it deserved ; and the Whig party 
was strengthened and adorned by the accession of Edmund 
Burke. 

The party, indeed, stood in need of accessions , for it sustained 
about this time an almost irreparable loss. The Duke of Cum- 
berland had formed the government, and was its main support. 
His exalted rank and great name in some degree balanced the 
fame of Pitt. As mediator between the Whigs and the Court, he 
held a place which no other person could fill. The strength of 
his character supplied that which was the chief defect of the new 
ministry. Conway, in particular, who, with excellent intentions 
and respectable talents, was the most dependent and irresolute of 
human beings, drew from the counsels of that masculine mind a 
determination not his own. Before the meeting of Parliament 
the duke suddenly died. His death was generally regarded as 
the signal of great troubles, and on this account, as well as from 
respect for his personal qualities, was greatly lamented. It was 
remarked that the mourning in London was the most general 
ever known, and was both deeper and longer than the " Gazette " 
had prescribed. 

In the mean time every mail from America brought alarming 

1 The coffee-house where the " Literary Club" met once a week. This 
famous club was founded in 1764, and included among its members, besides 
Burke and Johnson, such men as Goldsmith, Garrick, and Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. 



8o MACAU LAY. 

tidings. The crop which Grenville had sown, his successors had 
now to reap. The Colonies were in a state bordering on re- 
bellion. The stamps were burned. The revenue officers were 
tarred and feathered. All traffic between the discontented prov- 
inces and the mother country was interrupted. The exchange 
of London was in dismay. Half the firms of Bristol and Liver- 
pool were threatened with bankruptcy. In Leeds, Manchester, 
Nottingham, it was said that three artisans out of every ten had 
been turned adrift. Civil war seemed to be at hand ; and it 
could not be doubted, that, if once the British nation were 
divided against itself, France and Spain would soon take part in 
the quarrel. 

Three courses were open to the ministers. The first was to 
enforce the Stamp Act by the sword. This was the course on 
which the King, and Grenville, whom the King hated beyond all 
living men, were alike bent. The natures of both were arbitrary 
and stubborn. They resembled each other so much that they 
could never be friends ; but they resembled each other also so 
much that they saw almost all important practical questions in 
the same point of view. Neither of them would bear to be gov- 
erned by the other, but they were perfectly agreed as to the best 
way of governing the people. 

Another course was that which Pitt recommended. He held 
that the British Parliament was not constitutionally competent to 
pass a law for taxing the Colonies. He therefore considered the 
Stamp Act as a nullity, — as a document of no more validity than 
Charles's writ of ship-money, or James's proclamation dispensing 
with the penal laws. 1 This doctrine seems to us, we must own, 
to be altogether untenable. 

Between these extreme courses lay a third way. The opinion 
of the most judicious and temperate statesmen of those times was 
that the British Constitution had set no limit whatever to the 

1 The penal laws were directed against Roman Catholics. James II. en- 
deavored to nullify them by his illegal Declaration of Indulgence in 1687. 
They were repealed by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 8r 

legislative power of the British King, Lords, and Commons, over 
the whole British Empire. Parliament, they held, was legally 
competent to tax America, as Parliament was legally competent 
to commit any other act of folly or wickedness, to confiscate the 
property of all the merchants in Lombard Street, or to attaint any 
man in the kingdom of high treason, without examining witnesses 
against him, or hearing him in his own defense. The most atro- 
cious act of confiscation or of attainder is just as valid an act as 
the Toleration Act 1 or the Habeas Corpus Act. But from acts 
of confiscation and acts of attainder lawgivers are bound, by 
every obligation of morality, systematically to refrain. In the 
same manner ought the British Legislature to refrain from taxing 
the American Colonies. The Stamp Act was indefensible, not 
because it was beyond the constitutional competence of Parlia- 
ment, but because it was unjust and impolitic, sterile of revenue, 
and fertile of discontents. These sound doctrines were adopted 
by Lord Rockingham and his colleagues, and were, during a 
long course of years, inculcated by Burke in orations, some of 
which will last as long as the English language. 

The winter came, the Parliament met, and the state of the 
Colonies instantly became the subject of fierce contention. Pitt, 
whose health had been somewhat restored by the waters of Bath, 
reappeared in the House of Commons, and, with ardent and 
pathetic eloquence, not only condemned the Stamp Act, but ap- 
plauded the resistance of Massachusetts and Virginia, and vehe- 
mently maintained, — in defiance, we must say, of all reason and 
of all authority, — that, according to the British Constitution, the 
supreme legislative power does not include the power to tax. 
The language of Grenville, on the other hand, was such as 
Strafford might have used at the council table of Charles I., when 
flews came of the resistance to the liturgy at Edinburgh. 2 The 

1 This was the Act of 1689, granting freedom of worship to dissenters. 

2 Charles I., in 1637, made a futile attempt to impose the Episcopal lit- 
urgy on the Presbyterians of Scotland. In Edinburgh this endeavor pro- 
voked the dangerous Porteus riots. 

6 



82 MA CAUL AY. 

Colonists were traitors : those who excused them were little bet- 
ter. Frigates, mortars, bayonets, sabers, were the proper rem- 
edies for such distempers. 

The ministers occupied an intermediate position : they pro- 
posed to declare that the legislative authority of the British Par- 
liament over the whole empire was in all cases supreme ; and 
they proposed, at the same time, to repeal the Stamp Act. To 
the former measure Pitt objected, but it was carried with scarcely 
a dissentient voice. The repeal of the Stamp Act Pitt strongly 
supported, but against the government was arrayed a formidable 
assemblage of opponents. Grenville and the Bedfords were 
furious. Temple, who had now allied himself closely with his 
brother, and separated himself from Pitt, was no despicable 
enemy. This, however, was not the worst. The ministry was 
without its natural strength. It had to struggle, not only against 
its avowed enemies, but against the insidious hostility of the King, 
and of a set of persons who about this time began to be desig- 
nated as the King's friends. 

The character of this faction has been drawn by Burke with 
even more than his usual force and vivacity. Those who know 
how strongly, through his whole life, his judgment was biased by 
his passions, may not unnaturally suspect that he has left us rather 
a caricature than a likeness ; and yet there is scarcely in the 
whole portrait a single touch of which the fidelity is not proved 
by facts of unquestionable authenticity. 

The public generally regarded the King's friends as a body of 
which Bute was the directing soul. It was to no purpose that 
the earl professed to have done with politics, that he absented 
himself year after year from the levee and the drawing-room, that 
he went to the north, that he went to Rome. The notion that 
in some inexplicable manner he dictated all the measures of the 
Court, was fixed in the minds, not only of the multitude, but of 
some who had good opportunities of obtaining information, and 
who ought to have been superior to vulgar prejudices. Our own 
belief is that these suspicions were unfounded, and that he ceased 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 83 

to have any communication with the King on political matters 
some time before the dismissal of George Grenviile. The sup- 
position of Bute's influence is indeed by no means necessary to 
explain the phenomena. The King, in 1765, was no longer the 
ignorant and inexperienced boy who had in 1760 been managed 
by his mother and his groom of the stole. He had, during sev- 
eral years, observed the struggles of parties, and conferred daily 
on high questions of state with able and experienced politicians. 
His way of life had developed his understanding and character. 
He was now no longer a puppet, but had very decided opinions 
both of men and things. Nothing could be more natural than 
that he should have high notions of his own prerogatives, should 
be impatient of opposition, and should wish all public men to be 
detached from each other and dependent on himself alone ; nor 
could anything be more natural than that, in the state in which 
the political world then was, he should find instruments fit for 
his purposes. 

Thus sprang into existence and into note a reptile species of 
politicians never before and never since known in our country. 
These men disclaimed all political ties except those which bound 
them to the throne. They were willing to coalesce with any 
party, to abandon any party, to undermine any party, to assault 
any party, at a moment's notice. To them, all administrations 
and all oppositions were the same. They regarded Bute, Gren- 
viile, Rockingham, Pitt, without one sentiment either of predilec- 
tion or of aversion. They were the King's friends. It is to be 
observed that this friendship implied no personal intimacy. These 
people had never lived with their master, as Dodington at one 
time lived with his father, or as Sheridan afterwards lived with his 
son. They never hunted with him in the morning, or played 
cards with him in the evening ; never shared his mutton, or walked 
with him among his turnips. Only one or two of them ever saw 
his face except on public days. The whole band, however, al- 
ways had early and accurate information as to his personal in- 
clinations. These people were never high in the administration. 



84 MACAU LAY. 

They were generally to be found in places of much emolument, 
little labor, and no responsibility; and these places they con- 
tinued to occupy securely while the cabinet was six or seven 
times reconstructed. Their peculiar business was, not to support 
the ministry against the opposition, but to support the King 
against the ministry. Whenever his Majesty was induced to give 
a reluctant assent to the introduction of some bill which his 
constitutional advisers regarded as necessary, his friends in the 
House of Commons were sure to speak against it, to vote against 
it, to throw in its way every obstruction compatible with the 
forms of Parliament. If his Majesty found it necessary to admit 
into his closet a secretary of state or a first lord of the treasury 
whom he disliked, his friends were sure to miss no opportunity 
of thwarting and humbling the obnoxious minister. In return 
for these services, the King covered them with his protection. It 
was to no purpose that his responsible servants complained to 
him that they were daily betrayed and impeded by men who 
were eating the bread of the government. He sometimes jus- 
tified the offenders, sometimes excused them, sometimes owned 
that they were to blame, but said that he must take time to con- 
sider whether he could part with them. He never would turn 
them out ; and, while everything else in the state was constantly 
changing, these sycophants seemed to have a life estate in their 
offices. 

It was well known to the King's friends, that, though his Maj- 
esty had consented to the repeal of the Stamp Act, he had con- 
sented with a very bad grace ; and that though he had eagerly 
welcomed the Whigs, when, in his extreme need and at his earn- 
est entreaty, they had undertaken to free him from an insupport- 
able yoke, he had by no means got over his early prejudices 
against his deliverers. The ministers soon found, that, while they 
were encountered in front by the whole force of a strong opposi- 
tion, their rear was assailed by a large body of those whom they 
had regarded as auxiliaries. 

Nevertheless, Lord Rockingham and his adherents went on 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 85 

resolutely with the bill for repealing the Stamp Act. They had 
on their side all the manufacturing and commercial interests of 
the realm. In the debates the government was powerfully sup- 
ported. Two great orators and statesmen, belonging to two 
different generations, repeatedly put forth all their powers in de- 
fense of the bill. The House of Commons heard Pitt for the 
last time, and Burke for the first time, and was in doubt to which 
of them the palm of eloquence should be assigned. It was in- 
deed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn. 

For a time the event seemed doubtful. In several divisions 
the ministers were hard pressed. On one occasion, not less than 
twelve of the King's friends, all men in office, voted against the 
government. It was to no purpose that Lord Rockingham re- 
monstrated with the King. His Majesty confessed that there was 
ground for complaint, but hoped that gentle means would bring 
the mutineers to a better mind. If they persisted in their mis- 
conduct, he would dismiss them. 

At length the decisive day arrived. The gallery, the lobby, 
the Court of Requests, the staircases, were crowded with mer- 
chants from all the great ports of the island.* The debate lasted 
till long after midnight. On the division the ministers had a 
great majority. The dread of civil war, and the outcry of all 
the trading towns of the kingdom, had been too strong for the 
combined strength of the Court and the opposition. 

It was in the first dim twilight of a February morning 1 that 
the doors were thrown open, and that the chiefs of the hostile 
parties showed themselves to the multitude. Conway was re- 
ceived with loud applause. But when Pitt appeared, all eye3 
were fixed on him alone. All hats were in the air. Loud and 
long huzzas accompanied him to his chair, and a train of admirers 
escorted him all the way to his home. Then came forth Gren- 
ville. As soon as he was recognized, a storm of hisses and curses 
broke forth. He turned fiercely on the crowd, and caught one 

1 Of the year 1766. The Act was repealed on the iSth of March follow- 



86 MACAU LAY. 

man by the throat. The bystanders were in great alarm. If a 
scuffle began, none could say how it might end. Fortunately, 
the person who had been collared only said, " If I may not hiss, 
sir, I hope I may laugh," and laughed in Grenville's face. 

The majority had been so decisive, that all the opponents of 
the ministry, save one, were disposed to let the bill pass without 
any further contention. But solicitation and expostulation were 
thrown away on Grenville. His indomitable spirit rose up 
stronger and stronger under the load of public hatred. He 
fought out the battle obstinately to the end. On the last read- 
ing he had a sharp altercation with his brother-in-law, the last of 
their many sharp altercations. Pitt thundered in his loftiest tones 
against the man who had wished to dip the ermine of a British 
king in the blood of the British people. Grenville replied with 
his wonted intrepidity and asperity. " If the tax," he said, " were 
still to be laid on, I would lay it on. For the evils which it 
may produce, my accuser is answerable. His profusion made it 
necessary. His declarations against the constitutional powers of 
kings, Lords, and Commons have made it doubly necessary. I 
do not envy him the huzza. I glory in the hiss. If it were to 
be done again, I would do it." 

The repeal of the Stamp Act was the chief measure of Lord 
Rockingham's government. But that government is entitled to 
the praise of having put a stop to two oppressive practices, which, 
in Wilkes's case, had attracted the notice and excited the just 
indignation of the public. The House of Commons was induced 
by the ministers to pass a resolution condemning the use of gen- 
eral warrants, and another resolution condemning the seizure of 
papers in cases of libel. 

It must be added, to the lasting honor of Lord Rockingham, 
that his administration was the first which, during a long course 
of years, had the courage and the virtue to refrain from bribing 
members of Parliament. PI is enemies accused him and his 
friends of weakness, of haughtiness, of party spirit ; but calumny 
itself never dared to couple his name with corruption. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 87 

Unhappily his government, though one of the best that has 
ever existed in our country, was also one of the weakest. The 
King's friends assailed and obstructed the ministers at every turn. 
To appeal to the King was only to draw forth new promises and 
new evasions. His Majesty was sure that there must be some 
misunderstanding. Lord Rockingham had better speak to the 
gentlemen. They should be dismissed on the next fault. The 
next fault was soon committed, and his Majesty still continued to 
shuffle. It was too bad. It was quite abominable ; but it mat- 
tered less as the prorogation was at hand. He would give the 
delinquents one more chance. If they did not alter their conduct 
next session, he should not have one word to say for them. He 
had already resolved, that, long before the commencement of the 
next session, Lord Rockingham should cease to be minister. 

We have now come to a part of our story which, admiring as 
we do the genius and the many noble qualities of Pitt, we can- 
not relate without much pain. We believe that at this conjunc- 
ture he had it in his power to give the victory either to the Whigs 
or to the King's friends. If he had allied himself closely with 
Lord Rockingham, what could the Court have done? There 
would have been only one alternative, — the Whigs or Grenville ; 
and there could be no doubt what the King's choice would be. 
He still remembered, as well he might, with the uttermost bitter- 
ness, the thraldom from which his uncle had freed him, and said 
about this time, with great vehemence, that he would sooner see 
the Devil come into his closet than Grenville. 

And what was there to prevent Pitt from allying himself with 
Lord Rockingham? On all the most important questions their 
views were the same. They had agreed in condemning the 
peace, the Stamp Act, the general warrant, the seizure of papers. 
The points on which they differed were few and unimportant. 
In integrity, in disinterestedness, in hatred of corruption, they 
resembled each other. Their personal interests could not clash. 
They sat in different Houses, and Pitt had always declared that 
nothing should induce him to be first lord of the treasury. 



88 MACAULAY. 

If the opportunity of forming a coalition beneficial to the state, 
and honorable to all concerned, was suffered to escape, the fault 
was not with the Whig ministers. They behaved towards Pitt 
with an obsequiousness which, had it not been the effect of sin- 
cere admiration and of anxiety for the public interests, might 
have been justly called servile. They repeatedly gave him to 
understand that, if he chose to join their ranks, they were ready 
to receive him, not as an associate, but as a leader. They had 
proved their respect for him by bestowing a peerage on the per- 
son who at that time enjoyed the largest share of his confidence, 
Chief Justice Pratt. What, then, was there to divide Pitt from 
the Whigs? What, on the other hand, was there in common 
between him and the King's friends, that he should lend himself 
to their purposes, — he who had never owed anything to flattery 
or intrigue, he whose eloquence and independent spirit had over- 
awed two generations of slaves and jobbers, he who had twice 
been forced by the enthusiasm of an admiring nation on a reluc- 
tant prince? 

Unhappily the Court had gained Pitt, not, it is true, by those 
ignoble means which were employed when such men as Rigby 
and Wedderburn were to be won, but by allurements suited to a 
nature noble even in its aberrations. The King set himself to 
seduce the one man who could turn the Whigs out without letting 
Grenville in. Praise, caresses, promises, were lavished on the 
idol of the nation. He, and he alone, could put an end to fac- 
tion, could bid defiance to all the powerful connections in the 
land united, — Whigs and Tories, Rockinghams, Bedfords, and 
Grenvilles. These blandishments produced a great effect ; for 
though Pitt's spirit was high and manly, though his eloquence 
was often exerted with formidable effect against the Court, and 
though his theory of government had been learned in the school 
of Locke and Sidney, 1 he had always regarded the person of the 
sovereign with profound veneration. As soon as he was brought 

1 That is, in the school of constitutional government. Both these distin- 
guished men wrote treatises in support of the sovereignty of the people. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 89 

face to face with royalty, his imagination and sensibility were too 
strong for his principles. H is Whiggism thawed and disappeared ; 
and he became, for the time, a Tory of the old Ormond pattern. 1 
Nor was he by any means unwilling to assist in the work of dis- 
solving all political connections. His own weight in the state 
was wholly independent of such connections. He was therefore 
inclined to look on them with dislike, and made far too little dis- 
tinction between gangs of knaves associated for the mere purpose 
of robbing the public, and confederacies of honorable men for 
the promotion of great public objects. Nor had he the sagacity 
to perceive that the strenuous efforts which he made to annihilate 
all parties tended only to establish the ascendency of one party, 
and that the basest and most hateful of all. 

It may be doubted whether he would have been thus misled, 
if his mind had been in full health and vigor ; but the truth is 
that he had for some time been in an unnatural state of excite- 
ment. No suspicion of this sort had yet got abroad. His elo- 
quence had never shone with more splendor than during the re- 
cent debates. But people afterwards called to mind many things 
which ought to have roused their apprehensions. His habits 
were gradually becoming more and more eccentric. A horror 
of all loud sounds, such as is said to have been one of the many 
oddities of Wallenstein, grew upon him. Though the most affec- 
tionate of fathers, he could not at this time bear to hear the 
voices of his own children, and laid out great sums at Hayes in 
buying up houses contiguous to his own, merely that he might 
have no neighbors to disturb him with their noise. He then sold 
Hayes, and took possession of a villa at Hampstead, where he 
again began to purchase houses to right and left. In expense, 
indeed, he vied, during this part of his life, with the wealthiest 
of the conquerors of Bengal and Tan j ore. At Burton Pynsent 
he ordered a great extent of ground to be planted with cedars. 
Cedars enough for the purpose were not to be found in Somer- 

1 That is, devoted to the throne. Ormond was a devoted adherent of the 
Stuarts. 



90 MACAULAY. 

setshire : they were therefore collected in London, and sent down 
by land carriage. Relays of laborers were hired, and the work 
went on all night by torchlight. No man could be more ab- 
stemious than Pitt ; yet the profusion of his kitchen was a wonder 
even to epicures. Several dinners were always dressing, for his 
appetite was capricious and fanciful ; and at whatever moment 
he felt inclined to eat, he expected a meal to be instantly on the 
table. Other circumstances might be mentioned, such as sepa- 
rately are of little moment, but such as, when taken together, and 
when viewed in connection with the strange events which fol- 
lowed, justify us in believing that his mind was already in a. 
morbid state. 

Soon after the close of the session of Parliament, Lord Rock- 
ingham received his dismissal. He retired, accompanied by a 
firm body of friends, whose consistency and uprightness enmity 
itself was forced to admit. None of them had asked or obtained 
any pension or any sinecure, either in possession or in reversion. 
Such disinterestedness was then rare among politicians.- Their 
chief, though not a man of brilliant talents, had won for himself 
an honorable fame, which he kept pure to the last. He had, in 
spite of difficulties which seemed almost insurmountable, removed 
great abuses and averted a civil war. Sixteen years later, 1 in a 
dark and terrible day, he was again called upon to save the state, 
brought to the very brink of ruin by the same perfidy and ob- 
stinacy which had embarrassed, and at length overthrown, his 
first administration. 

Pitt was planting in Somersetshire when he was summoned to 
court by a letter written by the royal hand. He instantly has- 
tened to London. The irritability of his mind and body were 
increased by the rapidity with which he traveled ; and when he 
reached his journey's end he was suffering from fever. Ill as he 
was, he saw the King at Richmond, 2 and undertook to form an 
administration. 

1 Rockingham succeeded Lord North in March, 1782. 

2 The seat of one of the royal palaces. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 91 

Pitt was scarcely in the state in which a man should be who 
has to conduct delicate and arduous negotiations. In his letters 
to his wife he complained that the conferences in which it was 
necessary for him to bear a part heated his blood and accelerated 
his pulse. From other sources of information we learn that his 
language, even to those whose cooperation he wished to engage, 
was strangely peremptory and despotic. Some of his notes writ- 
ten at this time have been preserved, and are in a style which 
Louis XIV. 1 would have been too well bred to employ in address- 
ing any French gentleman. 

In the attempt to dissolve all parties, Pitt met with some diffi- 
culties. Some Whigs, whom the Court would gladly have de- 
tached from Lord Rockingham, rejected all offers. The Bed- 
fords were perfectly willing to break with Grenville, but Pitt 
would not come up to their terms. Temple, whom Pitt at first 
meant to place at the head of the treasury, proved intractable. 
A coldness indeed had, during some months, been fast growing 
between the brothers-in-law, so long and so closely allied in poli- 
tics. Pitt was angry with Temple for opposing the repeal of the 
Stamp Act. Temple was angry with Pitt for refusing to accede 
to that family league which was now the favorite plan at Stowe. 
At length the earl proposed an equal partition of power and 
patronage, and offered, on this condition, to give up his brother 
George. Pitt thought the demand exorbitant, and positively re- 
fused compliance. A bitter quarrel followed. Each of the kins- 
men was true to his character. Temple's soul festered with spite, 
and Pitt's swelled into contempt. Temple represented Pitt as 
the most odious of hypocrites and traitors. Pitt held a different 
and perhaps a more provoking tone. Temple was a good sort of 
man enough, whose single title to distinction was, that he had a 
large garden, with a large piece of water, and a great many pa- 
vilions and summer-houses. To his fortunate connection with a 

1 " His treatment of his court was such as nothing but their abject fear of 
him, and the meanness engendered by the atmosphere of such a court, could 
explain." 



92 MACAULAY. 

great orator and statesman he was indebted for an importance in 
the state which his own talents could never have gained for him. 
That importance had turned his head. He had begun to fancy 
that he could form administrations, and govern empires. It was 
piteous to see a well-meaning man under such a delusion. 

In spite of all these difficulties, a ministry was made such as 
the King wished to see, — a ministry in which all his Majesty's 
friends were comfortably accommodated, and which, with the 
exception of his Majesty's friends, contained no four persons who 
had ever in their lives been in the habit of acting together. Men 
who had never concurred in a single vote found themselves seated 
at the same board. The office of paymaster was divided between 
two persons who had never exchanged a word. Most of the 
chief posts were filled either by personal adherents of Pitt, or by 
members of the late ministry, who had been induced to remain 
in place after the dismissal of Lord Rockingham. To the former 
class belonged Pratt, now Lord Camden, who accepted the great 
seal, and Lord Shelburne, who was made one of the secretaries 
of state. To the latter class belonged the Duke of Grafton, who 
became first lord of the treasury, and Conway, who kept his old 
position, both in the government and in the House of Commons. 
Charles Townshend, who had belonged to every party, and cared 
for none, was chancellor of the exchequer. Pitt himself was de- 
clared prime-minister, but refused to take any laborious office. 
He was created Earl of Chatham, and the privy seal was de- 
livered to him. 

It is scarcely necessary to say, that the failure — the complete 
and disgraceful failure — of this arrangement is not to be ascribed 
to any want of capacity in the persons whom we have named. 
None of them was deficient in abilities ; and four of them — Pitt 
himself, Shelburne, Camden, and Townshend — were men of high 
intellectual eminence. The fault was not in the materials, but in 
the principle on which the materials were put together. Pitt had 
mixed up these conflicting elements in the full confidence that he 
should be able to keep them all in perfect subordination to him- 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 93 

self, and in perfect harmony with each other. We shall soon see 
how the experiment succeeded. 

On the very day on which the new prime-minister kissed 
hands, 1 three fourths of that popularity which he had long enjoyed 
without a rival, and to which he owed the greater part of his 
authority, departed from him. A violent outcry was raised, not 
against that part of his conduct which really deserved severe 
condemnation, but against a step in which we can see nothing to 
censure. His acceptance of a peerage produced a general burst 
of indignation. Yet surely no peerage had ever been better 
earned, nor was there ever a statesman who more needed the re- 
pose of the Upper House. Pitt was now growing old. He was 
much older in constitution than in years. It was with imminent 
risk to his life that he had on some important occasions attended 
his duty in Parliament. During the session of 1764 he had not 
been able to take part in a single debate. It was impossible that 
he should go through the nightly labor of conducting the busi- 
ness of the government in the House of Commons. His wish to 
be transferred, under such circumstances, to a less busy and a 
less turbulent assembly, was natural and reasonable. The nation, 
however, overlooked all these considerations. Those who had 
most loved and honored the Great Commoner were loudest in 
invective against the new-made Lord. London had hitherto 
been true to him through every vicissitude. When the citizens 
learned that he had been sent for from Somersetshire, that he 
had been closeted with the King at Richmond, and that he was 
to be first minister, they had been in transports of joy. Prepara- 
tions were made for a grand entertainment and for a general 
illumination. The lamps had actually been placed round the 
Monument, when the " Gazette " announced that the object of 
all this enthusiasm was an earl. Instantly the feast was counter- 
manded. 1 ne lamps were taken down. The newspapers raised 
the roar of obloquy. Pamphlets, made up of calumny and scur- 
rility, filled the shops of all the booksellers ; and of those pam- 
1 That is, kissed the sovereign's hands on taking office. 



94 MACAU LAY. 

phlets the most galling were written under the direction of the 
malignant Temple. It was now the fashion to compare the two 
Williams, — William Pulteney 1 and William Pitt. Both, it was 
said, had, by eloquence and simulated patriotism, acquired a 
great ascendency in the House of Commons and in the country ; 
both had been intrusted with the office of reforming the govern- 
ment ; both had, when at the height of power and popularity, 
been seduced by the splendor of the coronet ; both had been 
made earls, and both had at once become objects of aversion and 
scorn to the nation which a few hours before had regarded them 
with affection and veneration. 

The clamor against Pitt appears to have had a serious effect 
on the foreign relations of the country. His name had till now 
acted like a spell at Versailles and St. Ildefonso. 2 English travel- 
ers on the Continent had remarked that nothing more was neces- 
sary to silence a whole roomful of boasting Frenchmen than to 
drop a hint of the probability that Mr. Pitt would return to 
power. In an instant there was deep silence : all shoulders rose, 
and all faces were lengthened. Now, unhappily, every foreign 
court, in learning that he was recalled to office, learned also that 
he no longer possessed the hearts of his countrymen. Ceasing 
to be loved at home, he ceased to be feared abroad. The name 
of Pitt had been a charmed name. Our envoys tried in vain to 
conjure with the name of Chatham. 

The difficulties which beset Chatham were daily increased by 
the despotic manner in which he treated all around him. Lord 
Rockingham had, at the time of the change of ministry, acted 
with great moderation, had expressed a hope that the new gov- 
ernment would act on the principles of the late government, and 
had even interfered to prevent many of his friends from quitting 
office. Thus Saunders and Keppel, two naval commanders of 

1 Pulteney became Earl of Bath. lie was a prominent opposition leader 
in the days of Walpole's ministry. 

2 Versailles (a suburb of Paris) and St. Ildefonso (a suburb of Madrid) 
were the seats of the French and Spanish courts respectively. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 95 

great eminence, had been induced to remain at the Admiralty, 
where their services were much needed. The Duke of Portland 
was still lord-chamberlain ; and Lord Besborough, postmaster. 
But within a quarter of a year Lord Chatham had so deeply 
affronted these men, that they all retired in disgust. In truth, 
his tone, submissive in the closet, was at this time insupportably 
tyrannical in the cabinet. His colleagues were merely his clerks 
for naval, financial, and diplomatic business. Conway, meek as 
he was, was on one occasion provoked into declaring that such 
language as Lord Chatham's had never been heard west of Con- 
stantinople, and was with difficulty prevented by Horace Wal- 
pole 1 from resigning, and rejoining the standard of Lord Rock- 
ingham. 

The breach which had been made in the government by the 
defection of so many of the Rockinghams, Chatham hoped to 
supply by the help of the Bedfords ; but with the Bedfords he 
could not deal as he had dealt with other parties. It was to no 
purpose that he bade high for one or two members of the fac- 
tion, in the hope of detaching them from the rest. They were 
to be had, but they were to be had only in the lot. There was 
indeed, for a moment, some wavering and some disputing among 
them ; but at length the counsels of the shrewd and resolute 
Rigby prevailed. They determined to stand firmly together, and 
plainly intimated to Chatham that he must take them all, or that 
he should get none of them. The event proved that they were 
wiser in their generation than any other connection in the state. 
In a few months they were able to dictate their own terms. 

The most important public measure of Lord Chatham's ad- 
ministration was his celebrated interference with the corn trade. 
The harvest had been bad ; the price of food was high ; and he 
thought it necessary to take on himself the responsibility of lay- 
ing an embargo on the exportation of grain. When Parliament 
met, this proceeding was attacked by the opposition as unconsti- 
tutional, and defended by the ministers as indispensably necessary. 

1 The son of Sir Robert Walpole ; wit, antiquarian, and man of letters. 



96 MACAU LAY. 

At last an act was passed to indemnify all who had been con- 
cerned in the embargo. 

The first words uttered by Chatham in the House of Lords 
were in defense of his conduct on this occasion. He spoke with 
a calmness, sobriety, and dignity well suited to the audience 
which he was addressing. A subsequent speech which he made 
on the same subject was less successful. He bade defiance to 
aristocratical connections with a superciliousness to which the 
Peers were not accustomed, and with tones and gestures better 
suited to a large and stormy assembly than to the body of which 
he was now a member. A short altercation followed, and he was 
told very plainly that he should not be suffered to browbeat the 
old nobility of England. 

It gradually became clearer and clearer that he was in a dis- 
tempered state of mind. His attention had been drawn to the 
territorial acquisitions of the East India Company, and he deter- 
mined to bring the whole of that great subject before Parliament. 
He would not, however, confer on the subject with any of his 
colleagues. It was in vain that Conway, who was charged with 
the conduct of business in the House of Commons, and Charles 
Townshend, who was responsible for the direction of the finances, 
begged for some glimpse of light as to what was in contempla- 
tion. Chatham's answers were sullen and mysterious. He must 
decline any discussion with them ; he did not want their assist- 
ance ; he had fixed on a person to take charge of his measure in 
the House of Commons. This person was a member who was 
not connected with the government, and who neither had, nor 
deserved to have, the ear of the House, — a noisy, purse-proud, 
illiterate demagogue, whose cockney English and scraps of mis- 
pronounced Latin were the jest of the newspapers, — Alderman 
Beckford. It may well be supposed that these strange proceed- 
ings produced a ferment through the whole political world. The 
city was in commotion. The East India Company invoked the 
faith of charters. Burke thundered against the ministers. The 
ministers looked at each other, and knew not what to say. In 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 97 

the midst of the confusion, Lord Chatham proclaimed himself 
gouty, and retired to Bath. It was announced, after some time, 
that he was better, that he would shortly return, that he would 
soon put everything in order. A day was fixed for his arrival in 
London ; but when he reached the castle inn at Marlborough, he 
stopped, shut himself up in his room, and remained there some 
weeks. Everybody who traveled that road was amazed by the 
number of his attendants. Footmen and grooms, dressed in his 
family livery, filled the whole inn, though one of the largest in 
England, and swarmed in the streets of the little town. The 
truth was that the invalid had insisted that during his stay all the 
waiters and stable-boys of the castle should wear his livery. 

His colleagues were in despair. The Duke of Grafton pro- 
posed to go down to Marlborough in order to consult the oracle ; 
but he was informed that Lord Chatham must decline all con- 
versation on business. In the mean time all the parties which 
were out of office — Bedfords, Grenvilles, and Rockinghams — 
joined to oppose the distracted government on the vote for the 
land tax. They were reenforced by almost all the county mem- 
bers, and had a considerable majority. This was the first time 
that a ministry had been beaten on an important division in the 
House of Commons since the fall of Sir Robert Walpole. The 
administration thus furiously assailed from without was torn by 
internal dissensions. It had been formed on no principle what- 
ever. From the very first, nothing but Chatham's authority had 
prevented the hostile contingents which made up his ranks from 
going to blows with each other. That authority was now with- 
drawn, and everything was in commotion. Conway, a brave 
soldier, but in civil affairs the most timid and irresolute of men, 
afraid of disobliging the King, afraid of being abused in the 
newspapers, afraid of being thought factious if he went out, afraid 
of being thought interested if he staid in, afraid of everything, 
and afraid of being known to be afraid of anything, was beaten 
backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock, between Horace 
Walpole, who wished to make him prime-minister, and Lord John 
7 



9 8 MACAU LAY. 

Cavendish, who wished to draw him into opposition. Charles 
Townshend, a man of splendid eloquence, of lax principles, and 
of boundless vanity and presumption, would submit to no con- 
trol. The full extent of his parts, of his ambition, and of his 
arrogance, had not yet been made manifest ; for he had always 
quailed before the genius and the lofty character of Pitt. But 
now that Pitt had quitted the House of Commons, and seemed 
to have abdicated the part of chief minister, Townshend broke 
loose from all restraint. 

While things were in this state, Chatham at length returned to 
London. He might as well have remained at Marlborough. 
He would see nobody. He would give no opinion on any pub- 
lic matter. The Duke of Grafton begged piteously for an inter- 
view for an hour, for half an hour, for five minutes. The answer 
was that it was impossible. The King himself repeatedly con- 
descended to expostulate and implore. " Your duty," he wrote, 
"your own honor, require you to make an effort." The answers 
to these appeals were commonly written in Lady Chatham's 
hand, from her lord's dictation ; for he had not energy even to 
use a pen. He flings himself at the King's feet. He is pene- 
trated by the royal goodness, so signally shown to the most un- 
happy of men. He implores a little more indulgence. He can- 
not as yet transact business. He cannot see his colleagues. 
Least of all can he bear the excitement of an interview with 
majesty. 

Some were half inclined to suspect that he was, to use a mili- 
tary phrase, malingering. He had made, they said, a great 
blunder, and had found it out. His immense popularity, his 
high reputation for statesmanship, were gone forever. Intoxi- 
cated by pride, he had undertaken a task beyond his abilities. 
He now saw nothing before him but distresses and humiliations ; 
and he had therefore simulated illness, in order to escape from 
vexations which he had not fortitude to meet. This suspicion, 
though it derived some color from that weakness which was the 
most striking blemish of his character, was certainly unfounded. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 99 

His mind, before he became first minister, had been, as we have 
said, in an unsound state ; and physical and moral causes now 
concurred to make the derangement of his faculties complete. 
The gout, which had been the torment of his whole life, had been 
suppressed by strong remedies. For the first time since he was 
a boy at Oxford, he had passed several months without a twinge ; 
but his hand and foot had been relieved at the expense of his 
nerves. He became melancholy, fanciful, irritable. The em- 
barrassing state of public affairs, the grave responsibility which 
lay on him, the consciousness of his errors, the disputes of his 
collea gues, the savage clamors raised by his detractors, bewildered 
his enfeebled mind. One thing alone, he said, could save him : 
he must repurchase Hayes. The unwilling consent of the new 
occupant was extorted by Lady Chatham's entreaties and tears, 
and her lord was somewhat easier. But if business were men- 
tioned to him, he, once the proudest and boldest of mankind, 
behaved like an hysterical girl, trembled from head to foot, and 
burst into a flood of tears. 

His colleagues for a time continued to entertain the expecta- 
tion that his health would soon be restored, and that he would 
emerge from his retirement ; but month followed month, and 
still he remained hidden in mysterious seclusion, and sunk, as far 
as they could learn, in the deepest dejection of spirits. They at 
length ceased to hope or to fear anything from him, and, though 
he was still nominally prime-minister 4 took without scruple steps 
which they knew to be diametrically opposed to all his opinions 
and feelings, allied themselves with those whom he had pro- 
scribed, disgraced those whom he most esteemed, and laid taxes 
on the Colonies, in the face of the strong declarations which he 
had recently made. 

When he had passed about a year and three quarters in gloomy 
privacy, the King received a few lines in Lady Chatham's hand. 
They contained a request, dictated by her lord, that he might be 
permitted to resign the privy seal. After some civil show of re- 
luctance, the resignation was accepted. Indeed Chatham was 



ioo MACAU LAY. 

by this time almost as much forgotten as if he had already been 
lying in Westminster Abbey. 

At length the clouds which had gathered over his mind broke, 
and passed away. His gout returned, and freed him from a 
more cruel malady. His nerves were newly braced. His spirits 
became buoyant. He woke as from a sickly dream. It was a 
strange recovery. Men had been in the habit of talking of him 
as of one dead, and, when he first showed himself at the King's 
levee, started as if they had seen a ghost. It was more than two 
years and a half since he had appeared in public. 

He too had cause for wonder. The world which he now en- 
tered was not the world which he had quitted. The administra- 
tion which he had formed had never been, at any one moment, 
entirely changed ; but there had been so many losses and so 
many accessions, that he could scarcely recognize his own work. 
Charles Townshend was dead. Lord Shelburne had been dis- 
missed. Conway had sunk into utter insignificance. The Duke 
of Grafton had fallen into the hands of the Bedfords. The Bed- 
fords had deserted Grenville, had made their peace with the 
King and with the King's friends, and had been admitted to 
office. Lord North was chancellor of the exchequer, and was 
rising fast in importance. Corsica had been given up to France 
without a struggle. The disputes with the American Colonies 
had been revived. A general election had taken place. Wilkes 
had returned from exile, and, outlaw as he was, had been chosen 
knight of the shire 1 for Middlesex. The multitude was on his 
side. The Court was obstinately bent on ruining him, and was 
prepared to shake the very foundations of the Constitution for 
the sake of a paltry revenge. The House of Commons, assum- 
ing to itself an authority which of right belongs only to the whole 
legislature, had declared Wilkes incapable of sitting in Parlia- 
ment. Nor had it been thought sufficient to keep him out. An- 
other must be brought in. Since the freeholders of Middlesex 
had obstinately refused to choose a member acceptable to the 
1 That is, a county member of Parliament. 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 101 

Court, the House had chosen a member for them. This was not 
the only instance, perhaps not the most disgraceful instance, of 
the inveterate malignity of the Court. Exasperated by the steady 
opposition of the Rockingham party, the King's friends had tried 
to rob a distinguished Whig nobleman of his private estate, and 
had persisted in their mean wickedness till their own servile ma- 
jority had revolted from mere disgust and shame. Discontent 
had spread throughout the nation, and was kept up by stimulants 
such as had rarely been applied to the public mind. Junius 1 had 
taken the field ; had trampled Sir William Draper in the dust ; 
Bad well-nigh broken the heart of Blackstone ; and had so 
mangled the reputation of the Duke of Grafton, that his grace 
had become sick of office, and was beginning to look wistfully 
towards the shades of Euston. Every principle of foreign, do- 
mestic, and Colonial policy which was dear to the heart of Chat- 
ham had, during the eclipse of his genius, been violated by the 
government which he had formed. 

The remaining years of his life were spent in vainly struggling 
against that fatal policy which, at the moment when he might 
have given it a death-blow, he had been induced to take under 
his protection. His exertions redeemed his own fame, but they 
effected little for his country. 

He found two parties arrayed against the government, — the 
party of his own brothers-in-law, the Grenvilles ; and the party 
of Lord Rockingham. On the question of the Middlesex elec- 
tion these parties were agreed, 2 but on many other important 
questions they differed widely ; and they were, in truth, not less 
hostile to each other than to the Court. The Grenvilles had, 
during several years, annoyed the Rockinghams with a succession 

1 "Junius" was the signature of an unknown writer of political contro- 
versial letters which appeared in the London Public Advertiser, beginning 
in 1769, and continuing for about three years. For bitterness of invective 
and satirical severity, these letters have never been equaled in all literature. 

2 It was the county of Middlesex that repeatedly returned John Wilkes to 
Parliament. 



102 MACAU LAY. 

of acrimonious pamphlets. It was long before the Rockinghams 
could be induced to retaliate. But an ill-natured tract, written 
under Grenville's direction, and entitled "A State of the Nation," 
was too much for their patience. Burke undertook to defend 
and avenge his friends, and executed the task with admirable 
skill and vigor. On every point he was victorious, and nowhere 
more completely victorious than when he joined issue on those 
dry and minute questions of statistical and financial detail in 
which the main strength of Grenville lay. The official drudge, 
even on his own chosen ground, was utterly unable to maintain 
the fight against the great orator and philosopher. When Chat* 
ham reappeared, Grenville was still writhing with the recent 
shame and smart of this well-merited chastisement. Cordial 
cooperation between the two sections of the opposition was im- 
possible. Nor could Chatham easily connect himself with either. 
His feelings, in spite of many affronts given and received, drew 
him towards the Grenvilles : for he had strong domestic affec- 
tions ; and his nature, which, though haughty, was by no means 
obdurate, had been softened by affliction. But from his kinsmen 
he was separated by a wide difference of opinion on the question 
of Colonial taxation. A reconciliation, however, took place. 
He visited Stowe ; he shook hands with George Grenville ; and 
the Whig freeholders of Buckinghamshire, at their public dinners, 
drank many bumpers to the union of the three brothers. 

In opinions, Chatham was much nearer to the Rockinghams 
than to his own relatives ; but between him and the Rocking- 
hams there was a gulf not easily to be passed. He had deeply 
injured them, and in injuring them had deeply injured his coun- 
try. When the balance was trembling between them and the 
Court, he had thrown the whole weight of his genius, of his re- 
nown, of his popularity, into the scale of misgovernment. It 
must be added that many eminent members of the party still re- 
tained a bitter recollection of the asperity and disdain with which 
they had been treated by him at the time when he assumed the 
direction of affairs. It is clear from Burke's pamphlets and 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 103 

speeches, and still more clear from his private letters and from 
the language which he held in conversation, that he regarded 
Chatham with a feeling not far removed from dislike. Chatham 
was undoubtedly conscious of his error, and desirous to atone 
for it ; but his overtures of friendship, though made with earnest- 
ness, and even with unwonted humility, were at first received by 
Lord Rockingham with cold and austere reserve. Gradually the 
intercourse of the two statesmen became courteous and even 
amicable ; but the past was never wholly forgotten. 

Chatham did not, however, stand alone. Round him gathered 
a party, small in number, but strong in great and various tal- 
ents. Lord Camden, Lord Shelburne, Col. Barre, and Dunning 
(afterwards Lord Ashburton) were the principal members of this 
connection. 

There is no reason to believe, that, from this time till within a 
few weeks of Chatham's death, his intellect suffered any decay. 
His eloquence was almost to the last heard with delight ; but it 
was not exactly the eloquence of the House of Lords. That 
lofty and passionate but somewhat desultory declamation in 
which he excelled all men, and which was set off by looks, tones, 
and gestures worthy of Garrick or Talma, was out of place in a 
small apartment where the audience often consisted of three or 
four drowsy prelates, three or four old judges accustomed during 
many years to disregard rhetoric and to look only at facts and 
arguments, and three or four listless and supercilious men of 
fashion whom anything like enthusiasm moved to a sneer. In 
the House of Commons a flash of his eye, a wave of his arm, 
had sometimes cowed Murray ; but in the House of Peers his 
utmost vehemence and pathos produced less effect than the mod- 
eration, the reasonableness, the luminous order, and the serene 
dignity, which characterized the speeches of Lord Mansfield. 1 

1 Mansfield was, of course, one of the judges " disregardful of rhetoric; " 
but Macaulay takes it for granted that the reader will know that Mansfield 
and Murray are one. This kind of assumption, noticeable by non-insular 
readers, is frequent in Macaulay, and constitutes his one sin against clear- 



' °4 MA CA ULA Y. 

On the question of the Middlesex election all the three divi- 
sions of the opposition acted in concert. No orator in either 
House defended what is now universally admitted to have been 
the constitutional cause with more ardor or eloquence than 
Chatham. Before this subject had ceased to occupy the public 
mind, George Grenville died. His party rapidly melted away, 
and in a short time most of his adherents appeared on the minis- 
terial benches. 

Had George Grenville lived many months longer, the friendly 
ties which, after years of estrangement and hostility, had been 
renewed between him and his brother-in-law, would in all prob- 
ability have been a second time violently dissolved ; for now the 
quarrel between England and the North American Colonies took 
a gloomy and terrible aspect. Oppression provoked resistance ; 
resistance was made the pretext for fresh oppression. The warn- 
ings of all the greatest statesmen of the age were lost on an im- 
perious court and a deluded nation. Soon a Colonial senate 
confronted the British Parliament. Then the Colonial militia 
crossed bayonets with the British regiments. At length the com- 
monwealth was torn asunder. Two millions of Englishmen, who 
fifteen years before had been as loyal to their prince and as proud 
of their country as the people of Kent or Yorkshire, separated 
themselves by a solemn act from the empire. For a time it 
seemed that the insurgents would struggle to small purpose 
against the vast financial and military means of the mother coun- 
try ; but disasters, following one another in rapid succession, 
rapidly dispelled the illusions of national vanity. At length a 
great British force, 1 exhausted, famished, harassed on every side 
by a hostile peasantry, was compelled to deliver up its arms. 
Those governments which England had in the late war so sig- 
nally humbled, and which had during many years been sullenly 
brooding over the recollections of Quebec, of Minden, and of 

ness (see Devonshire . . . Cavendish, p. 53 ; Buckingham . . . / 'illicrs, 
p. 46). 

1 That of Burgoyne. The surrender took place Oct. 13, 1777. 



THE EARL OE CHATHAM. 105 

the Moro, 1 now saw with exultation that the day of revenge was 
at hand. France recognized the independence of the United 
States ; and there could be little doubt that the example would 
soon be followed by Spain. 

Chatham and Rockingham had cordially concurred in oppos- 
ing every part of the fatal policy which had brought the state 
into this dangerous situation , but their paths now diverged. 
Lord Rockingham thought, and, as the event proved, thought 
most justly, that the revolted Colonies were separated from the 
empire forever, and that the only effect of prolonging the war on 
the American continent would be to divide resources which it 
was desirable to concentrate. If the hopeless attempt to subju- 
gate Pennsylvania and Virginia were abandoned, war against the 
House of Bourbon might possibly be avoided, or, if inevitable, 
might be carried on with success and glory. We might even in- 
demnify ourselves for part of what we had lost, at the expense of 
those foreign enemies who had hoped to profit by our domestic 
dissensions. Lord Rockingham, therefore, and those who acted 
with him, conceived that the wisest course now open to England 
was to acknowledge the independence of the United States, and 
to turn her whole force against her European enemies. 

Chatham, it should seem, ought to have taken the same side. 
Before France had taken any part in our quarrel with the Colo- 
nies, he had repeatedly, and with great energy of language, de- 
clared that it was impossible to conquer America, and he could 
not without absurdity maintain that it was easier to conquer 
France and America together than America alone. But his pas- 
sions overpowered his judgment, and made him blind to his own 
inconsistency. The very circumstances which made the separa- 
tion of the Colonies inevitable made it to him altogether insup- 
portable. The dismemberment of the empire seemed to him less 
ruinous and humiliating, when produced by domestic dissensions, 

1 Morro Castle, the fort of Havana, captured by the English admiral, Po- 
cock, in 1762. Havana was restored to Spain the next year in exchange for 
Florida. 



106 MA CAUL AY. 

than when produced by foreign interference. His blood boiled 
at the degradation of his country. Whatever lowered her among 
the nations of the earth, he felt as a personal outrage to himself. 
And the feeling was natural. He had made her so great. He 
had been so proud of her, and she had been so proud of him. 
He remembered how, more than twenty years before, in a day 
of gloom and dismay, when her possessions were torn from her, 
when her flag was dishonored, she had called on him to save her. 
He remembered the sudden and glorious change which his energy 
had wrought, the long series of triumphs, the days of thanksgiv- 
ing, the nights of illumination. Fired by such recollections, he 
determined to separate himself from those who advised that the 
independence of the Colonies should be acknowledged. That he 
was in error will scarcely, we think, be disputed by his warmest 
admirers. Indeed, the treaty by which, a few years later, the 
republic of the United States was recognized, was the work of 
his most attached adherents and of his favorite son. 

The Duke of Richmond had given notice of an address to the 
throne against the further prosecution of hostilities with America. 
Chatham had during some time absented himself from Parliament 
in consequence of his growing infirmities. He determined to 
appear in his place on this occasion, and to declare that his 
opinions were decidedly at variance with those of the Rocking- 
ham party. He was in a state of great excitement. His medi- 
cal attendants were uneasy, and strongly advised him to calm 
himself, and to remain at home ; but he was not to be controlled. 
His son William, and his son-in-law Lord Mahon, accompanied 
him to Westminster. He rested himself in the chancellor's room 
till the debate commenced, and then, leaning on his two young 
relations, limped to his seat. The slightest particulars of that 
day were remembered, and have been carefully recorded. He 
bowed, it was remarked, with great courtliness, to those peers 
who rose to make way for him and his supporters. His crutch 
was in his hand. He wore, as was his fashion, a rich velvet coat. 
His legs were swathed in flannel. His wig was so large, and his 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 107 

face so emaciated, that none of his features could be discerned, 
except the high curve of his nose, and his eyes, which still re- 
tained a gleam of the old fire. 

When the Duke of Richmond had spoken, Chatham rose. 
For some time his voice was inaudible. At length his tones be- 
came distinct, and his action animated. Here and there his 
hearers caught a thought or an expression which reminded them 
of William Pitt. But it was clear that he was not himself. He 
lost the thread of his discourse, hesitated, repeated the same 
words several times, and was so confused, that, in speaking of 
the Act of Settlement, he could not recall the name of the Elec- 
tress Sophia. The House listened in solemn silence, and with 
the aspect of profound respect and compassion. The stillness 
was so deep that the dropping of a handkerchief would have 
been heard. The Duke of Richmond replied with great tender- 
ness and courtesy ; but while he spoke, the old man was ob- 
served to be restless and irritable. The duke sat down. Chat- 
ham stood up again, pressed his hand on his breast, and sank 
down in an apoplectic fit. Three or four lords who sat near him 
caught him in his fall. The House broke up in confusion. The 
dying man was carried to the residence of one of the officers of 
Parliament, and was so far restored as to be able to bear a jour- 
ney to Hayes. At Hayes, after lingering a few weeks, he expired 
in his seventieth year. His bed was watched to the last with 
anxious tenderness by his wife and children ; and he well de- 
served their care. Too often haughty and wayward to others, 
to them he had been almost effeminately kind. He had through 
life been dreaded by his political opponents, and regarded with 
more awe than love even by his political associates. But no fear 
seems to have mingled with the affection which his fondness, con- 
stantly overflowing in a thousand endearing forms, had inspired 
in the little circle at Hayes. 

Chatham, at the time of his decease, had not, in both Houses 
of Parliament, ten personal adherents. Half the public men of 
the age had been estranged from him by his errors, and the other 



108 MACAULAY. 

half by the exertions which he had made to repair his errors. 
His last speech had been an attack at once on the policy pursued 
by the government, and on the policy recommended by the op- 
position. But death restored him to his old place in the affection 
of his country. Who could hear unmoved of the fall of that 
which had been so great, and which had stood so long? The 
circumstances, too, seemed rather to belong to the tragic stage 
than to real life. A great statesman, full of years and honors, 
led forth to the Senate House by a son of rare hopes, and stricken 
down in full council while straining his feeble voice to rouse the 
drooping spirit of his country, could not but be remembered with 
peculiar veneration and tenderness. The few detractors who 
ventured to murmur were silenced by the indignant clamors of a 
nation which remembered only the lofty genius, the unsullied 
probity, the undisputed services, of him who was no more. For 
once the chiefs of all parties were agreed. A public funeral, a 
public monument, were eagerly voted. The debts of the de- 
ceased were paid. A provision was made for his family. The 
city of London requested that the remains of the great man 
whom she had so long loved and honored might rest under the 
dome of her magnificent cathedral. But the petition came too 
late. Everything was already prepared for the interment in 
Westminster Abbey. 

Though men of all parties had concurred in decreeing post- 
humous honors to Chatham, his corpse was attended to the grave 
almost exclusively by opponents of the government. The ban- 
ner of the lordship of Chatham was borne by Col. Barre, attended 
by the Duke of Richmond and Lord Rockingham. Burke, 
Savile, and Dunning upheld the pall. Lord Camden was con- 
spicuous in the procession. The chief mourner was young Wil- 
liam Pitt. After the lapse of more than twenty-seven years, in a 
season as dark and perilous, his own shattered frame and broken 
heart were laid, with the same pomp, in the same consecrated 
mold. 1 

l See Macaulay's fine essay on the Younger Pitt. 



THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 109 

Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a 
spot which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the 
other end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mans- 
field rests there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grat- 
tan, and Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so 
many great citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over 
those venerable graves towers the stately monument of Chatham ; 
and from above, his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, 
with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good 
cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes. The generation which 
reared that memorial of him has disappeared. The time has 
come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments which his con- 
temporaries passed on his character may be calmly revised by 
history. And history, while, for the warning of vehement, high, 
daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately 
pronounce, that, among the eminent men whose bones lie near 
his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more 
splendid, name, 



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